Colorless and Green
by WhatIfImaMermaid
Summary: Modern Day AU: Nyota is a Ph.D. student, Spock is a professor she is collaborating with. They should probably not fall in love.
1. Chapter 1

The first time he speaks with her, she comes to see him with her advisor.

He is in the process of perusing a particularly tricky piece of code that appears to require an unduly amount of debugging when he hears their footstep through the door, left approximately one inch ajar due to Christopher's insistent demands that students always feel welcome in faculty's offices.

The sound of heels clicking on the stone floor halts several feet before reaching the entrance. He can hear Doctor Pike— _Please, I told you to call me Vina, Spock_ —speak in a voice that attempts to be a whisper but is not quite low enough, perhaps because of an inadequate understanding of the building's acoustics.

"Now, he can be very…" She trails off, into a pause of three seconds. Spock can picture quite clearly her right hand waving in circles while she seeks the appropriate word, as he has witnessed before in multiple instances. "Well. Glacial. But don't take it personally. He's actually a great guy. Like a son, to Chris."

He barely has the time to wonder if that makes Vina like a mother to him when the footsteps resume, followed by a loud knock.

He minimizes his script editor window and swivels his chair to face the door. "Come in." He stands.

Vina enters first, a cloud of perfume and toothy smiles, her _so nice to see you_ a jumble of stretched out vowels and wavy pitch. _She_ steps in immediately behind, and remains silent, observing, until Vina takes her by the elbow and pulls her forward.

"As I mentioned in the email, this is Nyota Uhura, my graduate student." She turns to face her. "Nyota, this is Doctor Spock Grayson. I'm sure you've heard all about him, what with him being the superstar of UCSF Computer Science and all that. You look fantastic, Spock," she finishes with a chuckle.

 _She_ steps forward and extends her hand. The _latus rectum_ of the parabola that is her smile is significantly longer than Vina's. Spock wonders if it is due to some structural constraints posed by her facial features, or if she is just less happy than her advisor to be here.

"Nice to finally meet you, Doctor Grayson. Thank you for making the time to see us."

The handshake is firm, and it lasts very little. Less than a seconds, he estimates. Her skin is agreeably cool, and her nails are short, painted in a shade somewhere between red and black, which surely has a name that Spock has never had reason to learn. "Likewise. Please, sit down."

Spock waits until he is confident that his lower body is covered from view by his desk, and then flexes the hand she just touched, once.

...

Her dissertation project is not simple, but his role in it will be.

He was sent a grant proposal, authored by Miss Uhura, that was competently written, adequately informative, and provided all the necessary details to obtain a sufficient understanding of the study. He has, of course, read it in preparation for this meeting, and thus there is no real reason to go over the basic purpose and structure of the project once more. However, Spock has learned long ago that people, and people in academic settings in particular, appear to both underestimate others' ability to retain knowledge, and to vastly enjoy the sound of their own voices. Therefore, he does not interrupt Vina's protracted explanation, even at its most redundant moments.

He does wonder if the fact that Miss Uhura has yet to utter a word regarding her dissertation project is indicative of her intelligence, her reserve, or simply of Vina's tendency to talk at length.

"Fitting a computational model once the data is collected should be a relatively easy matter," he says at the end of Vina's speech, while both women look at him expectantly. "The data files can be transferred to the Computer Science servers and I will run the analysis using HPCC. I will need to consult with you to decide the parameters and the most appropriate algorithms, but I should be able to complete the rest on my own and to provide you with the final results." He alternates looking at each woman, unsure of who exactly is in charge of the project.

"If it's possible, I would like to be involved, Doctor Grayson." She has a remarkably melodic voice. Pleasant to listen to. Lovely, his mother might have called it. Even if she is saying something he has heard before, multiple times, each time with a little more annoyance than the previous. "I don't know much about computational techniques but I would love to learn. It's the only way for me to stay on top of the project, really."

Her eyes are larger than average. That, or it is an effect created by the methods she uses to apply makeup. It briefly reminds him of an old acquaintance of his, and of staring at her from his bed as she chattered away happily while drawing lines on her eyelid with something that looked uncannily like a black pencil.

He nods once. "Very well," he answers her.

...

The first time he sees her, it is one year, ten months, and seven days before their first meeting.

All second-year Ph.D. students in Linguistics are required to give a short seminar on their first-year research projects. They are evaluated and ranked according to their performance by a panel of extra-departmental faculty, and the best presenter is awarded, if Spock understands correctly, a very modest cash prize, and the dubious glory of having one's face printed on letter-size posters and plastered inside the elevators of the Linguistics building, and possibly on the department website.

Spock and Jim are ostensibly having a grant meeting in one of the conference rooms in Computer Science when Christopher finds them. _You can't run, you can't hide from your department chair_ , Jim is fond of telling Spock.

"… and it turns out that that guy is completely wasted, so he actually lifts the freaking _iron_ bar stool he's sitting on and throws it in my dire—"

"Yes, yes. Charming, Kirk." Christopher is standing in the doorway, watching Jim with three parts disdain and one part amused fondness. "I need you and Spock to go over to Linguistics and play faculty judges for their student seminars or whatever the hell it is they do, yes, _again_. Or Vina's threatened to poison my cereal tomorrow morning."

Jim does not miss a beat. "Actually, I'm teach—"

"Nice try, but I checked your schedule. And please, tone it down with the negative feedback. I hear that last year one student got two 'boring' and one 'you should consult a competent statistical advisor' and ended up dropping out two weeks later."

Jim waits for Christopher to be out of earshot and grins at Spock. "Don't beat yourself up. He did need better stats."

Spock sighs. "Agreed."

For the first seven talks, he occupies himself by mentally revising a complex algorithm he has been making little progress on. He reaches the conclusion that adjusting the dynamic equation is not likely to yield more easily interpretable results, although a tweaking of the beta weights might do the trick, and if not, the matrices should—

He is yanked out of his reflections merely seconds after _she_ has taken the stage, when the audience around him erupts in laughter. She is laughing, too. Quite contagiously. Spock wonders if, had he heard it, he would have found her joke funny. It is unlikely.

She gesticulates while she speaks, graceful, sweeping arches, explaining intriguing concepts that he has never heard of before, complicated terms such as neo-whorfianism and polysemy. Her voice shakes, albeit minimally, and he thinks that she might be nervous, but her words remain clear and her sentences articulated. Her argument is compelling and well constructed, and when the moderator interrupts her to signal that she only has one minute left, Spock experiences a flicker on annoyance.

 _Let her speak._

If he were the type to notice these things, he would think her beautiful. He is not, of course.

When she steps down from the podium, after her conclusions, which are impressive, and after an applause, which is less enthusiastic than Spock deemed her talk deserving of, everyone in the seminar room stands. Linguistics has, apparently, cohorts of eight.

Jim makes a show of stretching his arms and craning his neck, a thinly disguised attempt to look around the room. "Check this out, Spock. And did you see on stage? They're all chicks in this department." Little by little, Jim has learned that similar comments should be made very, very quietly. It appears that no amount of correction from Spock or McCoy will convince him that they should not be made at all. "Hey, we're still on for basketball tonight, right?"

They turn in their ballots directly to Vina, who accepts them with a pleased smile and replies motherly to Jim's unabashed flirting. Spock has selected _her_ as the top presenter, and written as number two and three two names that, were quizzed in a police lineup, he could probably not associate with a face.

The following day he checks the Linguistics website and is disappointed to learn that she is not the winner.

...

"This is ridiculous. They are fucking morons, and they will regret this." Jim is incensed.

As is Spock, although less melodramatically so.

"To be fair, Jim, the rejection is not entirely unexpected. It _is_ Nature, after all." He cocks his head, and he acknowledges, "The reasons for the rejection, of course, are another matter…"

"'The paper would benefit from the use of Bayesian methods, which might be too complicated for the authors.'" Jim is reading out loud from the editor's report, cheeks flushed. His fury, like most of his emotions, and there is far-reaching range of them, is a sight to behold. "'Of little interest to anyone but the authors'? Fuck this shit. Anonymous reviewer, my ass. This is Nero. It's gotta be Nero. You know what I'm gonna do."

"I most certainly do no—"

"I'm gonna go downstairs, get my car, drive down to Pasadena, find his office and punch him in the face." He pauses for a breath. "And you're coming with me, Spock."

The corner of Spock's mouth twitches. Threatens to rise, until Spock successfully stifles it. "We have no evidence supporting that this particular reviewer is Nero."

Though, of course, it _is_ Nero.

"Yeah, you're right. What am I thinking?" Jim nods in all seriousness. "You should probably just stay here, so you can be my fake alibi later. You know what? Fuck it. We're going higher."

Spock sighs. He has estimated that meeting Jim four point seven years ago has increased his average daily sighing rate of six-hundred percent. His father would be appalled, were he to know. "Jim, it is Nature. There is no 'higher' impact factor journal."

A change in the color pattern in his peripheral field of view, or perhaps a soft noise coming from the office doorway, has him look up from Jim's scowl.

"Doctor Grayson. Hi."

It is _her_.

She is wearing sweater of a particularly intense red color. _Burgundy_ , his brain efficiently digs out from some poorly lit corner and provides. Her hair is long, and dark, and straight, and it is, as is the fate of all things with mass, subject to gravity. Spock forces himself not to follow its course down her chest with his gaze.

He should just focus on her eyes. Which are busy taking in Jim's feet, currently propped on Spock's desk. "Is this your office hours?"

It is, although by this point in the semester he usually has intimidated his undergraduate students to the degree that no one shows up for it. Hence Jim's sprawl on his guest chair.

"Correct. You may come in. Doctor Kirk was just about to leave for Pasadena."

Jim grudgingly lowers his legs to the ground. "I sure am." He turns to face Miss Uhura with a grin, the exceptionally wide, exceptionally friendly one that he usually reserves for attractive women. Spock is not annoyed, at least not more than he habitually is in Jim's presence. "And who do we have here? It's unlike you to have guests, Spock."

She hesitates, momentarily taken aback by Jim's interest. Her eyes dart to Spock before replying, as if seeking reassurance that yes, a tenure-track professor is presently flirting with her in a tenured professor's office. Spock attempts to keep his expression devoid of eye rolls. "I'm Nyota Uhura, Doctor Kirk. I'm a fourth year in Linguistics, working with Doctor Pike. It's nice to meet you."

Spock notices that she does not offer her hand.

Jim nods, suddenly uninterested. Students are off limits, of course, at least as long as they introduce themselves as students, and even more so if they do so on campus. "I see. Another student of Vina's…" His words are marked by a pointed look at Spock, a mix of understanding and pity. Miss Uhura stiffens visibly, and Spock experiences the strong temptation to throw a pencil sharpener at him. "Well, I'll leave you two to it while I go on my rampage. Spock, I'm resubmitting that paper without revising. Tonight. I'm thinking PNAS."

Spock's raises an eyebrow. "It might be best to ask for Doctor McCoy's opinion first. He has had several disagreements with one of editors, if I recall correctly."

"Not worth it. Bones could feud with my freaking cat." The last three words echo in the hallway outside the office, bouncing off the empty hallway.

Spock is left alone with _her_.

It is one year, nine months, and twenty-nine days since the first time he laid eyes on her.

She looks with diffidence at the chair Jim has been using, and then wisely opts for sitting on the other one. It takes some shuffling around, as in addition to her backpack and a tablet she is carrying a canvas bag, which reads 'Are you feeling tense, irregular, moody? You must be a verb.' It is, quite offensively, typed in Comic Sans.

"Thanks for making time, Doctor Grayson. And for agreeing to help me with my dissertation." Her voice _is_ lovely.

"You may call me Spock," he tells her. Being on a first-name basis fosters a positive, collaborative relationship with the student body. At least, according to another of Christopher's intradepartmental memos.

"Ok. Spock." She smiles while she repeats his name, as if tasting it on her lips.

He is, of course, unaffected. "Would you like to discuss your project?"

"Oh, no. I mean, yes, eventually, after the data mining stage is complete. But for now, I was wondering if you could recommend some introductory material to computational modeling. Something that you would have your first-year students read, perhaps." She hesitates for a second. She sounds quite earnest when she picks up again. "I really do mean to be as active as possible, even in the computing part of the project."

Although he has relatively little professional interest in linguistic, this is not the first time Spock has been asked to help a student. In fact, this is not the first, or the even the fifth time he has been asked to help one of Vina's student, courtesy of Christopher's manipulations. The fact that she often outsources her most complicated analyses to her husband's faculty is a running joke within the department.

In Spock's experience, Vina advises two types of students. The ones who want nothing to do with anything that involves mathematics. And the ones who want nothing to do with anything that involves mathematics, but require weeks to admit it to themselves. Over time, the latter kind winds up looking a Spock as if his favorite pastime were terrorizing young, defenseless, linguistically-oriented minds by brandishing lines of code. This kind also tends to demand quite a bit of his time, often with little results to show for it.

Suppressing a sigh, Spock stands and walks to his library. He collects three books and hands them to her, making sure not to brush her hands by accident.

"These are the textbooks I use for my graduate Computational Modeling class. It is a requirement for first-year students in the Computer Science program. I am not teaching the class this semester, so you may keep them as long as you like."

She smiles. Compared to last week, he notices, the _latus rectum_ is much shorter.

He is, yet again, unaffected.

"Thank you so much," she tells him standing up. She is, he notices now that there is no furniture between them, much shorter than he is. He supposes he thought she was taller, perhaps due to her slenderness. Perhaps she wore heels, when he previously saw her. Perhaps she simply disorients his perceptual systems, for no rhyme or reason. "I'll return them as soon as I've finished them."

"There is no haste." He walks back to his seat. "Have a good night, Miss Uhura."

"Nyota. Please, call me Nyota. Since I'm calling you Spock."

He nods once, and does not repeat her name.

She waves her hand, and is out of his office, exactly four minutes and fifty seconds after arriving.

He does not expect to see her again for a while.

...

Like every Thursday night, his Skype rings precisely at 10:30 PM.

Spock has been waiting at his desk for the past five minutes, staring at the sparse icons on his desktop, arms folded on his chest. Well before the camera turns on and the video settles, he knows that his pose will perfectly mimic his father's. _My boys. And all these barriers they love to erect_ , he can almost hear his mother say, her laughter full of sorrow and regret.

She is, without a doubt, the one single reason why these weekly conversations continue to occur, heavier and graver than the many others Spock has to simply forget about his father's existence. He is well aware that Sarek feels the same.

"Father," he begins in Swedish.

"Spock. How are you?" It is 5:30 AM in Stockholm. Although his father cannot have been awake for more than thirty minutes, his voice lacks any trace of hoarseness.

"Adequate. And you?"

"Acceptable. Do you have any news you wish to rely?"

When these ritual calls began, shortly after his mother's death, Spock would simply say that no, he had none, and the following conversation would last less than a handful of minutes. Spock would hang up, and spend long nights remembering his mother's cool hands on his forehead when he was ill, or the way she had manage to grow Kungsljus against all odds in the Embassy gardens, or her infinite patience when Spock was very young and persisted in expressing himself exclusively through mathematical terms. He would experience a feeling of discontent, a restlessness, which required several weeks to be identified as guilt.

Consequently, he began to communicate to Sarek a larger amount of details about his life. That, Spock soon discovered, was another mistake, as Sarek's opinion of his son's choices and behaviors had not altered in any meaningful way since Spock's childhood. Nor had Sarek's blunt way of sharing his displeasure.

Spock's current strategy, a product of many trials and many errors, is to disclose small pieces of comparatively inconsequential, harmless information, which provide his father with a suitable topic of conversation, but not with ammunition.

"I was recently awarded a grant supporting a collaboration with the department of Internal Medicine to produce a model of post-stroke mechanisms contributing to neural tissue damage." Innocuous. Meaningless. Generic.

"I congratulate you."

Spock nods in acknowledgement and talks for a few more minutes about the project, trying to avoid spacing out. His father would indubitably realize it.

When Spock's monologue is complete, it is Sarek's turn to speak of his work. His father used to be the Swedish ambassador to Tunisia, first, and later to the United States. He now occupies an important position in the Swedish government.

"You might have read this on the Expressen: Sjöberg's son was elected secretary of the Sverigedemokraterna. It is a great accomplishment, for one so young. His family is proud." His father is, as usual, expressionless.

Spock obtained his Ph.D. from MIT at the age of twenty-one, and was a tenured professor by the time he turned twenty-six. However, his lack of interest in a political career and, even worse, what his father once referred to as his 'radical leftist positions', reduce him to little more than wasteful disappointment.

"I do not often have the opportunity to read the Expressen," Spock replies carefully.

They hang up two minutes and thirty seconds later, with the promise to talk again the following week.

It is 10:49 PM.

Spock changes into his running clothing and exits his apartment.

...

He does not expect to see _her_ for a while.

Certainly not three days and twenty-two hours following her last visit.

This time his door is closed, as is every other faculty's door in the department, because Christopher was invited to a conference in France as the keynote speaker, and will not be back to San Francisco for at least one week.

Spock is in the process of quickly typing a response email to a student whom he cannot recall ever seeing attending class, and who just asked him for extra credits by addressing him as 'dude.'

The knock on the door is simultaneously cautious and firm.

"Enter," he says, and does not lift his eyes from the screen, even when the door opens and the visitor comes in.

"Hi, Spock." It is _her_ voice.

He has to expend a certain degree of effort to avoid leaving the email half written and turning to face her immediately. Still. He forces himself to complete the task at hand and then, only then, to spin his chair by thirty degrees and look at her.

The hair is curlier, today. The fashion in which the strands twine around her earrings, as well as the nimble way her fingers twirl the black strands, are most distracting. With surprise, Spock realizes that he has made her wait for seventeen seconds, and that she is fidgeting. "How may I help you?"

She lifts the book she is hugging to her chest to show him the title. It reads 'Models of Computation: An Introduction to Compatibility Theory', and it is familiar to him, as it is one of the three texts he lent her at the beginning of the week.

Odd, to think that something that usually resides in his library is now in her arms. But insignificant. Spock is unaffected by such a realization.

"This text is a bit... trickier than I expected. I know it's supposed to be introductory, but it relies on several informatics concepts that I've never encountered." To say that Spock is not a good reader of people's emotions would be a laughable understatement, and yet… she does not appear to be sad, or discouraged, or angry with him for assigning her a task beyond her current skillset. "I think I might need even _more_ elementary textbooks." Her smile is self-deprecating. Unlike her other ones, it is slightly non-symmetrical. Not a parabola, then. And yet, it could undoubtedly be graphed, with the correct quadratic polynomial equation. "I saw online that you also teach Intro to Computational Models for undergrads on odd years."

She does not continue, and just looks at him expectantly. Spock wonders if there is a question he did not detect in her words. If there are variables that he forgot to abstract and include in his implicit simulation of this conversation, leaving him helpless to predict its aim. There is something about her that is uniquely distracting, and than makes him struggle in their interactions a little more than he has in recent memory.

After a few seconds, she asks, "So… May I borrow the books you recommended for that class? The library copies are currently checked out."

 _Ah_. Of course.

He heads to the shelf, and starts searching for the books. Suzanne Perkins taught that class the previous semester, and as a consequence his copies have been moved to the highest shelf, the one even he has to go on his toes to reach.

As he retrieves the first one, he realizes that she has moved to stand next to him, seemingly to peruse his other titles. In order to grab the second book, he has to reach in her direction, about three feet above her head. She does not appear to notice.

It is a combination of factors outside of both their wills, that when he is back on his heels she is closer to him than she has ever been.

He is, yet again, unaffected.

She accepts the books with a smile, thanks him profusely, and wishes him a lovely weekend. She also remembers to close the door after herself when she walks out.

Spock stares at it for eleven seconds before returning to work.

...

He spends Friday evening revising a grant proposal with McCoy, Saturday evening in bed with Christine, and Sunday playing basketball with Jim. He works on a particularly complex piece of code in the remaining time.

Although not _lovely_ , it is a tolerable weekend.

...

Seventy-one hours and thirty-three minutes after the previous time, she comes by again.

Wordlessly, he hands her the textbooks he uses for his undergraduate Introduction to Computer Science class, and she accepts them with a symmetric smile. The _latus rectum_ 's length is unchanged.

...

He does not see her again for several weeks.

He does not expect to, as to date her determination has far surpassed her predecessors, but as much as she is an outlier, a ceiling effect is to be anticipated. He would not be surprised if her efforts culminated like most of her colleagues', with little learned and a total reliance on Spock to complete the computational part of her project.

He _is_ , however, surprised to find himself once or twice wishing that they did not.

When she comes, he has not thought of her for days, for various reasons: the usual work-related commitments; a particularly stressful conversation with his father regarding his unwillingness to meet with one of his acquaintances' young, single daughter who happens to live on the West Coast; an exhausting Sunday spent with Jim, babysitting McCoy's daughter; and the fact that it is the week past midterms and Gary, his teaching assistant for Programming Abstractions, appears to be confined at home with mononucleosis.

Which explains the horrifically long line he discovers right out of his office the day after the grades are released to the students. He counts eight, ten, twelve people sitting on the floor of the hallway, faces buried in their phones, and then abruptly stops, deciding that in this specific instance ignorance might be preferable. While he unlocks the door he allows himself a few seconds to fantasize about resigning, effective immediately, and accepting one of the job offers companies in the Silicon Valley extend him periodically.

Two hours later, he calls in the last person in line, fully ready to dial Gary's phone number and have him deal with them should they burst out crying because of an A minus, beg Spock to calculate what their score on the final exam should be to obtain a C as the overall grade, or ask where the syllabus can be obtained. Spock is well aware that he is not a particularly patient teacher, and that if it were left to his undergraduate course evaluations, the retention package that the department offers him every time another institution tries to recruit him would be significantly less rich. Or nonexistent.

He is massaging his temples when _she_ appears at the door, with a smile, a full-to-bursting backpack, and a small, brown paper bag.

The smile is arresting, and must be directed at him, as he is the only other person in the room. His heart, unaffected, keeps beating at the same rate at it was before she entered. Of course.

"Wow. I stopped by thirty minutes ago and there were still about ten people milling around." With some difficulty, she takes her backpack off her shoulder and sits on the chair in front of him. "It looked intense."

Spock feels his shoulders relax. "I trust you are not here to offer to take care of my grocery shopping in exchange for a better grade on your midterm."

She laughs. His heart definitely does not skip two, three beats. "What a coincidence. Last week someone offered to clean my apartment for free. I wonder if it's the same person?" She cocks her head, as if actually considering the possibility.

"I suppose I should be grateful that they did not offer to write a make-up paper."

"Right." She wrinkles he nose, and Spock finds himself wondering whether it is something everyone can do, or a special skill of hers. It is mesmerizing. "What better way to ingratiate yourself with your professors than giving them more to grade?" She small, delicate shudder. "I'm surprised you don't have a TA, though. I thought Computer Science offered several positions, since there are so many undergrads."

"I do. He chose an unfortunate time to be ill."

She nods sympathetically, and her eyes must catch the small bag on her lap, reminding her of its existence. She grabs it and offers it to Spock, her arm extending over his desk.

"Here, I got you this. I figure you'd need some sustenance after the office hours from hell."

There is a slight delay between the moment she offers the bag and the moment he is able to convince his own hand to lift and accept it. He opens it slowly, almost tentatively. It is a cookie. Spock stares at it dumbfounded for longer than is probably necessary.

"Chocolate pecan," she explains. "You're not allergic or anything, right?" He shakes his head, and his mouth waters. He cannot remember the last time he held a cookie in his hands, let alone ate one. He is not in the habit to consume sweets. Treats were not something that was tolerated in Sarek's household, although when he was a kid his mother would sometimes sneak him chocolate, or gummy bears.

"Thank you. It is much appreciated."

She waves her hand. "No problem." He is grateful that she does not seem to expect him to eat the cookie immediately, as he is not sure he could do so and pay attention to his surroundings. "I'm actually here to return your books. All seven of them." She gestures to her backpack, and then bends, starts extracting the volumes. "And I had a couple of question about the materials, if you think you can stand to talk about computers and stuff for a few more minutes."

He refrains from pointing out that the Programming Abstractions class he is teaching is not precisely about 'computers and stuff'. "I would be happy to."

Spock is never happy. And he never, ever lies.

Nonetheless, she rewards him with a smile that creases her eyes.

"Well, the thing is," she efficiently opens one of the books on the end chapter, right where a green post-it is sticking out, and points to a figure, "Hebbian learning. To describe it, I need a set of values for the weights and one for nodes, right?"

He nods once. "Correct."

"What is not clear to me is, how does the weight update rule work mathematically?"

Spock takes a blank piece of paper from a desk tray, then looks around for his pencil, only to find it mysteriously wedged underneath his keyboard. Ah, yes. He used it to explain a student that no matter what the final curve will be, his forty percent on the test is unlikely to become an A.

He starts drawing examples of nodes and weights, making sure to angle the paper so that she can see it clearly. She leans forward. He keeps his back straight. "What you should keep in mind, is that nodes that tends to activate simultaneously will develop stronger connections." He writes numbers underneath each symbol, and uses the pencil to guide her through his words. "In this case, the activation formula would require adding the activation of one node to all the other nodes to which it is connected. The sum will be adjusted by multiplying for the values of each weight, which in turn is influenced by the number of previous co-occurrences." She studies the paper for a few moments, nodding in understanding, then flashing him a quick smile.

"This is much clearer now. I guess something that confused me is that the emphasis in this text is always on prediction, and on how that's the goal of modeling one's data according to a specific set assumptions. But that just doesn't reflect several of the examples in this other text," she taps the hard cover of the book in her lap, "since many scientist already know the ending point, and just want help understanding the phenomena they are interested in. Does that make sense?"

Spock nods.

"So, this is probably a stupid question, but if this is the case, isn't it incorrect to assume that a model's main aim is prediction?"

"It is not."

"Oh, it isn't it? But, then why—"

"I meant, it is not a stupid question. In fact, it is a quite advanced one, which reflects a current debate in the field. It reveals a deep comprehension of the material you read. "

"Oh." She might be flushing. He does not posses enough elements to be certain.

"The answer is that models can be built for several reasons, that include the exploration of dynamical analogies, investigation of core dynamics or uncertainties, and data collection. In your case, you will want to build an explanatory model based on real life observations. Explanation and prediction are often conflated by scientists, but are in fact quite different concepts. We know, for instance, that earthquakes are caused by the movement of tectonic plaques, but we are largely unable to predicts when they will occur. The textbook you read adopts an overly simplistic view of the matter." Although his students rarely realize it.

She nods, and writes a few words on the notebook. "Thanks, this is helpful. You're a good teacher," she tells him without lifting her eyes.

If Spock had not been raised by Sarek, he would burst into laughter. As it is, he quirks an eyebrow. "I am not."

She looks up at him, surprised. "You are, too. Your explanations are very clear. And the books you chose were perfect."

"I believe, Miss Uhura, that yours might be a very unpopular opinion. You should not voice it outside of these walls."

She huffs a laugh. "Nyota," she reminds him.

He nods. Yet again, does not repeat her name.

"Well, thank you for taking the time to walk me through this." She hesitates for a second. "Would you mind if I stopped by again? To talk about all this stuff, and… you know. Ask questions?"

It would probably be best not to encourage her to come back. Unstructured meetings can be very time demanding, and he will need to submit several grants in the next few months. Any type of question she has could be easily redirected to one of his graduate students. Pavel, for example, has shown to be much more patient than Spock, and has an excellent grasp of the theoretical foundations that she will need to be familiar with to complete her project. Carol and Marlena, if he recalls correctly, have even taken Computational Linguistics classes during their Master's. They would both be more convenient options than Spock. For everyone involved.

"Of course. You are always welcome."

Spock never, ever lies.


	2. Chapter 2

"This ain't natural."

Jim leers at the female undergraduate students currently clustering around the pool table. "Oh, Bones. It's natural, all right." He sips his beer without taking his eyes off them.

"It's forty degrees wind chill outside. Why'd they come out without their pants? Or their shirts, for fuck's sake." As the father of a young daughter who is less than a decade away from becoming a teenager, McCoy has self-appointed as the protective, albeit ill tempered, uncle of the entire female population on campus. "Jim, quit staring at that gaggle. They could be your daughters."

"Not _all_ of them." Lacking McCoy's approval, Jim winks conspiratorially at Spock, unfazed when the only answers he receives is withering look. "In fact, none of the them. I'll have you know that I was responsible in my teens. If you know what I mean. And, a bit of a late bloomer."

McCoy snorts and shoots him a disbelieving look.

"Statistically speaking, it is likely that at least one of them has been, currently is, or will be in one of your courses." And if so, Spock fervently hopes that they never show up for Jim's class clothed in that manner. Or for office hours, comes to think of. "Moreover, they do not appear to be of an age to be allowed into a bar."

"Jesus. I can't believe we're spending our Saturday night in a grad student bar." McCoy shakes his head with dejection. "What the hell went wrong?" He takes a swig of his Bourbon.

"I, for one, commend the newly minted Doctor Sulu's choice of a grad bar that is mostly full of very pretty undergrads as a party venue." Jim declares happily, leaning back on his stool. "Just relax, Bones. You're the MD in the house. If one of them gets a cold stroke, you get to do CPR on them."

McCoy's eyes narrow. "Why are you even here, Jim?"

McCoy and Spock, of course, were Hikaru's academic advisors until three days ago, and there was no diplomatic way for them to refuse to attend his graduation party, no matter the location. Jim decided to join them, quite predictably, either to spend time with his friends, or, and it is more likely, persuaded by the promise of alcohol.

"Can't blame me. The company's delightful." He grins, bringing his drink to his lips and going back to stare at the group of girls. They display, Spock notes, the uncanny ability of communicating with each other while simultaneously dedicating their complete attention to their phones. He is somewhat impressed.

He is about to take a sip of his beer when he feels a gentle tap on his shoulder. "Spock!"

It is _her_.

Standing only a few feet from him. Even though they are most definitely not his office. He thinks. No, he is certain.

She is wearing a blue dress, he hair braided at her nape in a complicated, incomprehensible way. Spock instantly discards his previously formulated hypothesis, that it is the dull environment of campus, and of the Computer Science department in particular, that makes her shine by contrast. She appears to be exceedingly, and inexplicably, delighted to see him.

"I didn't peg you for the type to hang out at The Shipyard," she says teasingly, around her inexplicably delighted smile.

She addles his brain. With her voice, and her eyes, and her graceful hand that was on his shoulder for an entirely appropriate amount of time. There is no other explanation for him needing several seconds to recall that the Shipyard is the name of the establishment they are currently sitting inside.

"I do not believe I am," he answers her, half-wishing that he had the ability to show that he is pleased to see her, too.

"We're all here under duress, Miss." Both McCoy and Jim have turned to look at them. McCoy's eyes, in particular, seem appraising. Of her. Of Spock's reaction to her. "It's the sad lot of academic advisors."

She looks confused for a moment, and then her eyes widen with understanding. "Oh, you're here for Hikaru's party, too! You must be Doctor McCoy. I'm Nyota."

They shake hands. Spock is reminded of the first time he met her, in his office, and wonders if McCoy will need a minute to regroup after touching her, too.

It seems unlikely.

"Have you met the infamous Doctor Kirk, Nyota?" McCoy asks.

Jim leans forward on the table and beams at her. "Of course. Nyota and I go waaay back."

She answers directly to McCoy, making a show of ignoring Jim. "We met exactly once, in Spock's office, for approximately five seconds." And then, turning to Jim. "And please, call me Miss Uhura." She finishes in a sweet tone, indifferent to Jim's faux-hurt expression.

McCoy snickers, and Spock feels his mouth threaten to curl.

 _Fierce_. She is fierce.

"I like your student, Spock. Good head on her shoulder," the Doctor tells him while Jim and Nyota continue to mockingly glare at each other.

Logic dictates that he should disabuse McCoy of the notion that she is _his_ student, but Spock finds himself not wishing to. Irrationally so. "It is high praise, from Doctor McCoy," he tells her.

She smiles again. "Oh, Hikaru has told me plenty about how praises from Doctor McCoy and Doctor Grayson are worth they weight in gold. Not that he was complaining," she adds hurriedly in the end, raising her hands in front of her chest and grinning mischievously. She is wearing two thin, silver bracelet that draw Spock's gaze to her slim wrist, the round tip of her ulna, her willowy arm, and clink against each other making a sound that he cannot possibly hear over the din of the bar, and yet manages to completely capture his attention.

"I bet," McCoy chuckles. "Are you and Hikaru in the same program?"

She shakes her head. "No, I'm in Linguistics. But I used to be Ben's roommate years ago." As she explains, she curls her hand on the back of Spock's stool. It makes no difference. He was not leaning on it, anyway. "Before he and Hikaru got married, and left me to fend for myself."

McCoy shakes his head with a smile. "Today's young men just ain't no gentlemen. Speaking of, Jim, where do you think you're going?" he barks.

Jim is already halfway towards to the bar, where the mostly-undressed girls are still lingering.

"To get another drink," he yells over his shoulder, a determined grin in place.

Spock and McCoy share a look that is part exasperation, part genuine worry that Jim might do something that will cost him tenure. "Oh, fine. I'll go this time, but we need to invest in a freaking leash," McCoy mutters, and he makes his way from the table.

When Spock was child, his language development was slightly delayed. Not dramatically so, but his mother, ever the educator, was alarmed enough that he was brought to several of the best specialists Sarek's money could give them access to. It was found that the delay was partially, if not completely, due to the fact that since a very young age he had been exposed to several different languages, and while Spock was playing with the meager selection of Lego in a corner of the Doctor's office, she had smiled at his mother and told her that her son would become a chatterbox in no time.

She had not been quite correct.

Regardless, what was noted was that Spock's numerical cognition was off the charts. For a fifteen-year-old. Spock was four at the time.

From that moment on, numbers had been his solace. His mother, ever the educator, had found a way to explain to him meanings, complex notions, and social concepts in mathematical terms. Spock does not remember when he learned to count, cannot recall not knowing numbers, but he has memories of voraciously inhaling algebra and trigonometry as other children at the Embassy refused to allow him to play tag with them, and he had mastered calculus by the time Sarek had moved the family back to Sweden.

It is odd, then, that he should find himself stupefied by the fact that after two people have departed from a group of four, he is now alone with _her_.

Puzzling, truly.

She follows McCoy with her eyes for a few seconds and when it appears that saving Jim from himself will be a moderately lengthy task, she nimbly takes his seat.

"So, what are you drinking?" Her voice shakes a little within her smile, and he wonders if she is perhaps nervous to be alone with him without a desk, seven different textbooks, and questions about computational algorithms between them.

It would not explain why she has decided to stay at the table. In his company.

The situation is most confusing.

"Beer," he answers. There is a moment of silence that stretches perhaps a little too long, just enough to remind him that a modicum of self-disclosure is considered polite during informal conversation. He finds that he does not mind. "Imported. From Sweden. Discovering that they keep this brand was a small consolation after first seeing the inside of this establishment."

He was not attempting to make her laugh, but is nevertheless pleased with the outcome.

"What's so special about Swedish beer?"

He pours a little in McCoy's now empty glass for her to try. She does, and looks at him with a frown. "It's beer."

He nods once, feeling his eyes crease with amusement. "Indeed."

"So…?"

"Objectively, it is not outstanding." Modicum of self-disclosure. "I believe that I have somewhat of an emotional attachment to the taste. It reminds me of my teenage years."

Her eyes widen. "Oh, is that where you're from? I did wonder."

He cocks his head, sincerely curious. In his experience, most people assume he is American.

She flushes. "Oh, it's just…" She waves a hand. "You don't have an accent, precisely, but… an inflection, I would say. The type of intonation you have when you talk, it tells me that you weren't raised in the States." She appears to be flustered. "It's just, I'm a bit of a phonology buff, and I notice these really small things that are just… minor, really."

"Fascinating." Her skills, and her intelligence, as well as the fact that she seems to feel the unnecessary desire to downplay them. "Where were you raised?" he asks, and it is not solely because he has been told that reciprocation is the main rule of polite conversation. Not at all.

"Nairobi, Kenya. Until I was about ten. Then we moved here. So you see, I definitely have a bit of an inflection, too." Her smiles broadens suddenly. "It's funny, I come from one of the hottest places on earth, and you from one of the coldest."

It is not _funny_ , per se. However, with for once Spock does not feel the need to cling to the technicalities of semantics.

"True. However, I spent the first eight years of my life in Tunisia. It was much warmer than Sweden." He sees her eyes become wider still. "My father was the ambassador to Tunisia," he adds, anticipating her next question.

Absentmindedly, she swirls the remaining liquid in McCoy's glass. "Wow. Moving back to Sweden must have been a bit of shock for you. The temperature, if nothing else."

It was. Spock was cold for months, years after leaving Tunisia. Still is. "I did miss the desert."

She stares at him, suddenly animated. "So did I. When we first got here, I was convinced that my skin was never going to be dry again, and had the hardest time figuring out what time of the day it was because the colors and the lines and shadows were all wrong. And at night I just couldn't fall asleep, because there was no noise of the wind lifting—"

 _The sand_.

Spock knows. He remembers longing for the heat rising in the distance, for the impression of shimmering waves, and for the humidity to be sucked out of his system. He knows precisely what she was going to say, and so he should not care that Jim and McCoy are back at their table and have interrupted her.

"Check this out, I got three phone numbers." Jim is waving what looks like a used napkin beneath Spock's nose. Entirely too close for him to be able to read anything.

"I trust that you have no intention of making use them."

McCoy waves his hand. "Don't worry, in a couple of drinks he'll be hammered and I'll confiscate that."

Nyota slips out of her stool. "Here's your seat, Doctor McCoy. I kept it warm for you." She turns to Spock. Her smile is soft. "I'm gonna go back to my friends. It was nice seeing you."

Reciprocation and respect of turn taking are among the most important rules of polite conversation. "Likewise," he replies.

Cotton. There is cotton inside his head.

He does not watch her walk away, nor he wishes she had not. Instead, when Jim places another beer next to Spock's empty one, the sound of the glass hitting the wooden table deaf and flat, Spock thanks him with a nod and takes a sip. They keep a companionable silence for a few moments, broken by Jim.

"She's hot."

She is the most aesthetically pleasing thing Spock has ever laid eyes on. Still, he wishes Jim would refrain from talking about her.

"She seems smart," McCoy says cautiously, studying Spock with artful indifference. Spock swallows another mouthful of his beer, and says nothing.

...

The following week, she comes again during office hours, now thankfully deserted, armed with questions, and _thank you so much for your time_ s, and a Danish, telling him with mirth in her eyes that it is as close as Swedish pastry as she was able to procure.

By the week after that, he is leaving his door fully open.

Christopher walks by his office and gives him the thumbs-up.

...

"So, how will I know precisely how to connect the different elements of my models?"

"It will have to be hypothesis driven. Your assumptions will be based on other neurolinguistic work that has found that discrete neural systems communicate in unique ways. Everything will be translated into mathematical formulas." If he is reading her correctly, which of course he might not be, the fact that she is biting he lower lip indicates alarm. Perhaps uncertainty. Spock takes a wild guess at the reason and continues, "I will, of course, help you at this stage."

He must have guessed incorrectly, because she does not appear to be relieved.

"Is something the matter?"

"I just…" She is looking at the cactus on his windowsill. A present from JoAnna, according to McCoy, who explained that she insisted on buying it for Spock when they were shopping at the farmer's market. _She said it reminded her of you. Don't even ask. She had me get a purple spatula for Jim._ "I feel like I'm relying on your for this too much. Like it's not really my project anymore. I definitely could not do this without you."

Ah. "True. However, you also could not do this without a computer, or pen and paper, or electricity." She has lost interest in the plant and is now looking at him again. "My work is but another tool at your disposal. Without your research hypotheses, and your ability to interpret them, there would be no study."

She smiles.

...

"Demora, let him go… Sorry, Spock. She's in her exploration stage. Your lap is clearly the new frontier."

Spock finds that he does not mind. He has spent decades perfecting techniques to inconspicuously inch away from people when they attempt to touch him, to project a demeanor that is polite while simultaneously discouraging from approach, yet Demora's weight on his leg, her small hands on his chest, or even the bony knee stabbing into his abs, are not wholly unpleasant. For now.

He quickly locks the screen of his computer before she can type a string of nonsense on line four hundred and sixty three of his C++ script.

Although, who knows, that might finally make it work.

"It is no matter." Ben received an emergency call from work, and Sulu got saddled with babysitting duty shortly before their scheduled meeting. Hence Demora, currently settled in his lap, playing with the magnetic desk toy Christine gave him a few weeks ago.

 _I got this for you._

 _Why?_

She had shrugged. _On a whim. Your office needs livening up._

Whims are so far beyond Spock that he had not even attempted to understand, wondering why Christine should care about an office in which she cannot have spent longer than a cumulative three minutes.

Sulu is outlining his plan to revise the third chapter of his dissertation into a publishable manuscript when Demora raises her small, pointed face and tells Spock something. It is a question, if he parsed the intonation correctly, but not in a language Spock understands.

"She asked if it's magic." Hikaru provides the translation with a smile.

"It is a magnet. Its attractive properties are a product of the movement of electrons."

Sulu hides his smile into the palm of his hand. Demora does not. She beams at Spock and says, in English, "Magic!"

...

"No."

He is taken aback. Not by the fact that she would object, but by the determination in her tone. "No?"

"This switch, right here," she is pointing at the relevant region of the code, "would not be possible in a real-life neural network. It's just not…" She looks at his ceiling for inspiration. "Biological. You know?"

He does not. "Adding this connection would make the system over thirty percent more efficient."

She raises her eyebrows. "Yes, but would it make the model a good representation of the phenomenon of interest? I mean, isn't this one of the criticisms that is constantly leveraged against modeling, that so many parameters are included that the danger of overfitting is too high?"

He looks at her silently for what he knows to be an impolite amount of time.

"Indeed."

Her smile is so blinding, he has little hope to measure the _latum nostrum_.

She deletes the four relevant lines of code as if they were personally offensive to her, and then moves to the following chunk.

 _Fierce_. She is fierce.

...

"He wanted to challenge his grade for the AI paper. So that night I pulled it up and went through it again and the following day I looked the student in the eye and told him twice, _twice_ , that re-gradings have a fifty-fifty chance of ending up in lower scores. If you know what I mean." At the beginning of the conversation, the rate of Gary's speech was comparable to every other conversation they had in past. Spock is surprised to notice that as he progresses in his account, the number of words uttered per minute is getting higher. By the seconds. "Which it did, of course, because at this point I was pissed and I actually marked him down for grammar. Now it turns out that his mother is friends with one of the Deans or something." Distressed. Gary appears to be distressed. More than Spock has seen him before. "So he sent me this half-threatening email, and I'm not sure…"

Most people would be able to deduce what Gary is not sure of without him having to continue the sentence; and yet they would not be able to solve a definite integral just by looking at it. And here is Spock, the flip side of all of them.

A few years ago, Spock was asked to be a participant in a neuroscience study on the relationship between mathematical and social cognition in neurotypical individuals. They used an MRI to scan his brain, and had him take similar tests to the ones he had to go through as a young child, when all he had wanted was to play Lego or go run outside, between the jasmine bushes.

As he waits for Gary to elaborate, he idly wonders what they found in the twists and folds brain.

"Should I just mark the paper back up to the original grade?"

Ah. "No." Spock has little use for bullies. "Have him come to my office hours. It is not a request."

Gary smiles, slowly.

...

He hands her back the USB stick. It is pink, 'Peace, Love and Linguistics' typed in a white font on the larger side. The initial plan was to just email her the relevant papers, but several questions later he found himself copying several semesters worth of slides, far exceeding the 35 MB email attachment limit.

"Thank you." She zips it in the smallest pocked of her backpack. "I'll work on this over the weekend. I'll be spending it cat-sitting in a very large, very old, very creaky house. And Friday will be Halloween and all. Something not too exciting will be good to read."

"You will have to to procure additional material, then."

He surprises himself by saying it mostly to make her laugh. Spock is not so deep in his field that he believes algorithms to be enthusing.

She does not disappoint. She never disappoints.

He is, of course, unaffected.

"What about you? Any plans for Halloween?"

"No." No plans. The last time he was outside at night for Halloween was three years ago, when Jim forcibly collected him from his apartment with the pretense of a chess tournament, and then dragged downtown him to a club, where Spock proceeded to apprehensively guess the age of each girl Jim danced with. McCoy had berated Spock for months for his gullibility. Spock tries to thinks of it as a learning opportunity, although of course it was nothing but an unforgivable tactical mistake.

"Not the costume type, uh?"

He has not worn a costume since he was seven, when attendance to the Halloween party held at the American Embassy in Tunis has been mandatory. He had been a Mobius strip. His mother's idea, after he had categorically refused to go as an alien, an astronaut, or an elf.

He shakes his head. "I do not believe I am, no."

"So, what about…" She was smiling, symmetrical, medium _latum nostrum_ , but the parabola breaks immediately as she bites into her bottom lip. "You don't have kids, then? To bring, um, trick of treating?"

He is momentarily confused. Not that she would ask, but that she would not know this about him, after they have spent so much time together. Although the entirety of this time, with the sole exception of a few minutes in the second-worst bar Spock has ever entered, was spent in this very office, discussing research topics. How could he expect her to know?

Irrational. Utterly illogical.

"No," he answers carefully, and then adds for no discernible reason, "I am not married."

Being married is not a prerequisite for having children. A man could have twenty children and zero wives, or twenty wives, albeit not legally, and zero children. Therefore, his statement is unrelated to her question.

Irrational. Utterly illogical.

She does not appear to mind, he thinks. If he reads her smile correctly. She does seem to be flushing, however, which has him doubt his conclusions.

"Well, do you have a cat? Because I'm about to, for a whole weekend, and have zero experience."

Spock does not either, although he has vague memories of his mother's hamster. Of the way it seemed to like being petted by Spock, and seeds, and sleeping during the day. "Do you have any experience with pets in general?"

"Mm-mm." She shakes her head, a mix of humor and worry in her eyes. "I have always wanted to have one, though." Her eyes widen as she recalls something. "And I do have plant."

He does not laugh. He will not laugh. "I am not sure that qualifies."

"Hey. It's an avocado plant. Grown from the seed. It required a lot of care, I'll have you know."

"I am sure it did." He will not laugh. But a corner of his mouth might be inching up.

"His name is Tolkien."

"His?"

"Or hers. It changes. Based on the time of the day."

"I see. A hermaphroditic plant. Tolkien?"

"Did you know he was a linguist?"

He shakes his head. Somehow, he must have misplaced any awareness of the corner of his mouth. Probably somewhere between the twinkle in her eyes. "I did not."

"Surprisingly little known fact, if you ask me." Nyota turns and notices that someone is standing at his door. It is one of his undergraduate students, if Spock is correct. How he did not notice her before, even though she is well within his field of view, should be object of careful investigation.

"I'm all done with Doctor Grayson, you can come it." She efficiently gathers her backpack, and then her laptop, which sports a sticker in the upper left corner that says 'I want to be a schwa…It's never stressed.' A smile still plays on her lips. She thanks him and wishes him a good Halloween before walking out of the office.

"Good luck with the cat."

He hears her laughter and her footsteps as she walks down the hallway.

When she is gone, and his brain has returned to baseline, he remembers that he does not believe in luck.

...

 **Christine:** Still want to meet tonight?

 **Spock:** It will not be possible.

 **Christine:** Deadline?

 **Spock:** A seminar presentation to complete.

 **Christine:** When's that?

 **Spock:** Tomorrow at 9 AM.

 **Christine:** Ah, damn. Want to move it to Friday night?

 **Spock:** Yes.

 **Christine:** My place?

 **Spock:** I would prefer mine.

 **Christine:** Will be there at 9PM.

 **Christine:** Good luck with your talk

...

He rotated his computer monitor when it became clear that in order to follow her reasoning he will need some form of visual aid. As it turns out, it is her finger pointing at the relevant parts of the assembly transcript.

He infinitely appreciates that she hovers but never jabs at the screen. That some people do it aggravates him to no end, and Jim has been ruthlessly making use of the knowledge for the past few years.

"You see, it's in the words and their relative positions. He was asked 'Are you in full support of the Graduate Student Union and of the legislation that guarantees them bargaining power', and he answered, 'I'd support the legislation and the Union.' He has shifted from present tense to the conditional mood, shuffled the order of Union and Legislation to place the Union as far away from the first person pronoun as possible, and dropped all the qualifiers to boot. Language can reveal a lot about people's positions, even implicitly." She shakes her head with disapproval.

It did not come as a surprise, that she is vice-president of the Graduate Student Senate.

"Do you believe that if he is elected he will convince the Board to vote for a reduction of the Union's powers, then?

She looks at him and shrugs. "He all but said it."

Spock stares at her, impressed.

...

"You have fantastic taste in wine."

Spock does not. He has, however, basic observational skills and the ability to learn through trial and error. As he has dinner at Christopher and Vina's on average once a month, he has learned what types of wine are a safe bet to please his hostess.

Red, mainly Sangiovese, or Merlot. Never Moscato, or she will unleash on him her harshest punishment, which is pretending to forget about the wine and not serve it with dinner.

Christopher just looks at him while Vina heads to kitchen with the bottle.

"How are you doing, Spock?"

"Acceptable."

"Are you? Good. I'm not. I can't believe you actually have the courage to show up in my house after agreeing to interview at Caltech."

He did wonder why this month's invitation had come so soon. "I have no intention of transferring to Caltech. I simply want to take a look at their new facilities." Christopher has been Spock's mentor for years, and Spock's friend for only a slightly shorter amount of time. Which is why he knows that for it to successfully come across to Spock, he must convey that he is not fooled by employing a non-indifferent amount of body language. He crosses his arms, inclines his head, and raises his eyebrows skeptically, for good measure. "And, should Caltech make an offer, perhaps demand full fellowships for two of my incoming graduate students included in the retention package," Spock adds.

"You bank robber," Christopher mutters, heading in the direction Vina disappeared.

Spock follows, ready for battle.

They negotiate intermittently for the following hour, only interrupted by Vina's fruitless attempts to swerve their exchanges to something not money related, like the upcoming local elections, or the new parking ramp they tore down half a park to build, or the unusually cold weather. She does not succeed until halfway though their meal.

"Nyota tells me the collaboration with her is going exceptionally well."

Christopher glances up from his salad and throws Spock a glance, half-amused, half-apologetic. Spock looks back at him levelly, chewing his salad. Vina is oblivious to the interaction, as she has been to the similar dozens that have occurred in the previous years, whenever the matter of one of her advisee has arisen.

Spock swallows a slice of yellow pepper. "It is."

"Good. Great. She's one of my best students. Brilliant, really. Had to fight to get her to come here, with her tests scores and her background. Very linguistically minded." When she says very, the _e_ sound stretches jarringly in Spock's ear. "But I know she can be a little intense. You know? Very driven. Obsessed, sometimes."

Spock lets the tip of his fork rest at the bottom of his salad bowl, speared through a tomato.

Impossible, to continue eating during this conversation.

"She's not taking up too much of your time, is she? Because I can tell her to ease up a bit."

No. "No." Spock never repeats himself unless asked to. "No, she is not."

Vina smiles and inclines her head. "Good."

The _o_ sound stretches jarringly in Spock's ear.

"One fellowship, and one ridiculously low-workload teaching assistantship. The python lab should have an opening."

"Unacceptable, Christopher."

"Damn you."

...

"How can you collaborate with people in so many different disciplines? I mean, Internal Medicine, Neuroimaging, Biology…"

Shortly after sitting down she has caught sight of a pile a books arranged on his desk, to be returned to the library at his earliest opportunity, and has spent thirty-six seconds reading the titles, some out loud, and marveling at the variety.

He could have used those thirty-six seconds to complete the last sentence of his email to Jim and send it. No need for careful re-reading for that, since Jim himself has long foregone the use of capitalizations and habitually signs himself 'theKirk' even for department-wide emails. The time would have sufficed.

Instead, he opted for looking at her looking at his books.

"All these fields are much closer to my original training than Linguistics is," he points out, not unkindly.

She smile. Asymmetric. "Point taken. Still, I think it's impressive, that you can keep that amount of information in your head."

He knows people _think_ so. And yet he does not understand. It is just notions. Just observational knowledge. There for him to pluck, abstract, manipulate, and translate into numbers. "I find it remarkable that you are able to deduce geographical provenance and attitudes purely based on speech patterns and syntax."

The smile slowly becomes symmetric, the _latum nostrum_ of short length.

"It's good that we're collaborating, then."

He nods. "Agreed."


	3. Chapter 3

"Father," he says it in English, and then he catches himself and repeats it in Swedish.

He has had little time to run and exercise due to several back-to-back deadlines, and as a consequence has been sleeping poorly and fitfully. He attributes the slip up to fatigue.

Sarek, uncharacteristically, pretends not to notice. "Spock. How are you?"

"Satisfactory. And you?"

"Acceptable. Do you have any news you wish to rely?"

He considers talking about the neurolinguistic project he is collaborating on with Nyota, and immediately discards the idea. "Very little. Two of my students have received employment offers from Google, yet again. If they accept, it is likely to leave one of my most promising current projects unmanned."

"Which project?"

Spock explains.

...

 **From:** Nyota Uhura _Nyota-Uhura_

 **To:** Spock Grayson _Spock-Grayson_

 **Subject:** Thesis Committee

Hi Spock,

I will need to finalize my dissertation committee by next week, and I was hoping you would agree to be the fifth (external) member. I believe you know the project as well as I do by now, but I would be happy to provide you with whatever materials might help you make a decisions. In terms of time commitment, being a member would entail sitting in for a prospectus meeting a few weeks from now, and then for my dissertation defense.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Best,

Nyota

 **From:** Spock Grayson _Spock-Grayson_

 **To:** Nyota Uhura _Nyota-Uhura_

 **RE:** Thesis Committee

Nyota,

Of course.

Spock

...

Two weeks before finals she does not come for his office hours.

Of course, he does not notice her absence, nor he misses her presence.

"TA stuff," she tells him the following week, dark smudges under her eyes. "Apparently someone posted half of last year's final's questions on some kind of online message board. We had to rewrite four separate versions of the Intro to Linguistics exam." She rubs her eyes with her index fingers. "I don't suppose you could use your legendary hacking skills to find out who it was so I can hunt them down and keep them awake for two nights in a row?"

He considers the workload involved and the ethical implications for a few moments. Her plan seems fair, and feasible. Logical. He is amenable.

"I hate TAing." She looks pensive for a moment and then waves a hand, her fingernails painted that dark red color again. "I love TAing. It's just, it gets in the way of doing the actual work I'm in grad school for, sometimes." A beat. "All the time." A resigned smile.

He calls up the relevant email and rotates the monitor before the thought is fully articulated in his head, taking himself by surprise.

"You would be eligible to apply for a fellowship issued from the Computer Science department, as you are currently collaborating with my lab. It would cover your salary and tuition for next semester, and you would not need to hold a teaching assistantship."

Spock has already recommended Pavel for the fellowship, but he is allowed to nominate up to two students. Moreover, Pavel has been glancing at Spock with such expressions of guilt that even _he_ was able to easily detect them. He expects to be informed of his decision to accept Google's offer any day now.

She lays her right hand on the edge of his desk and leans forward to read the email, her expression interested, brow furrowed.

She smells.

Good.

She smells good.

"It says the deadline was last week."

"Originally, but it was pushed back. It is due today at midnight."

Her smile is sudden, and arresting. "Awesome. I think I can put together an application by then." She bites her lip, going through the email for what has to be a second time, as he knows her to be a quick reader. She turns to him. "Thanks for showing this to me." She pulls her phone out of her coat pocked. "Do you mind if I email Vina to ask her for the rec letter? It'll take just a minute."

Spock hesitates. He wonders whether it is appropriate for a number of seconds. Whether it is intrusive, or illogical, given that formally he is not her advisor. He tries to recall what the protocol should be, what he has done in the past during similar situations, and realizes that he has never offered to write a recommendation letter for a student. That he was always approached and asked to do it, before.

Fascinating.

"I am available to write the letter." She lifts her eyes from her phone. Wide. They are wide, because of the make-up she is wearing, and because of her expression, and because of the structure of her facial features. "The committee will be more likely to be receptive if the letter comes from a member of the department." Although Vina _is_ the wife of the chair. The situation is unclear.

"Oh." She appears to be quietly surprised. "That would be awesome, actually." Now she is hesitating quite visibly. "Should I send you my CV? And my application once I've put it together? It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours."

He nods.

She nods.

Her smile is arresting.

...

"Do you hate me?"

A puppy. Pavel's expression reminds Spock of the one of an attaché's son's puppy, right after tearing apart the pillows in the Embassy conference room.

Not rolling his eyes is a feat. An accomplishable one, Spock hopes." I do not, Pavel."

"It's not that I didn't love working for you, it's just that…"

Finally, a sentence he can help complete. "They are offering you a raise of over three hundred percent, full benefits, and a nine to five job. Believe me, I understand the temptation, and I do not fault you for your decision." Pavel is not the first student to be hired from under him, nor the tenth, and will not be the last. Spock himself has been courted by the industry since he was in his late teens. In weeks like these, when has to field emails from helicopter parents, lead a search committee, and has received word that a million dollar grant he put in has not been recommended for funding, he does not know what keeps him in Academia.

Not the sense of achievement, for sure.

Maybe he should follow Pavel's example.

"However, should you change your mind, there will always be a place for you in my lab."

Pavel starts tearing up.

Spock loses his fight with the eye roll, and feels as close to quitting Academia as he has even been.

...

 **From:** Spock Grayson _Spock-Grayson_

 **To:** Nyota Uhura _Nyota-Uhura_

 **FW: RE:** Stuff up for grabs

 _Hi CompSci Faculty and Students,_

 _I am (finally) graduating and moving at the end of the semester, and will not be able to bring with me tons of stuff, so I left a bunch of things the CompSci grad student lounge. It's a large assortment, including books, CDs, kitchen utensils, and several potted plants (some of them even flower if actually water them and don't keep'em in a basement). Just grab anything that strikes your fancy and take it home!_

 _Hope to see you all at my farewell party!_

 _Cheers,_

 _Anna_

I thought Tolkien might perhaps be in need of company.

Spock

...

"Come on. Why not?"

"Why yes?" McCoy barks back, wrestling his iPhone back from Jim.

"How else are you guys gonna meet people?"

Spock sighs without sighing. That neither Spock nor McCoy are interested in 'meeting people' at this juncture is not an argument Jim will be receptive to. Spock knows, because he has attempted it. On several occasions. "Jim, humans have managed to meet other humans for millennia. Without the need for online dating."

"Yeah, but there were arranged marriages and diasporas and all those public execution events in the main square and whatnot. Today, you need Tinder."

"I need better taste in company, that's what I need." McCoy mutters, frantically pawing at his phone in an effort to revert whatever it is that Jim programmed. Spock would forfeit half of his grant money before admitting it out loud, but the sight of McCoy dealing with technology is always endearing. He hands Spock the phone. "Can you undo whatever voodoo thing that he did on this stupid machine?" Spock does, silently impressed by the fact that Jim has managed to effectively set up McCoy's Tinder profile in a matter of seconds. _Leonard, but call me Bones. I love yoga, brunch and long walks on the beach. Good with my hands._ "And since you're there, can you install an app to get rid of this infant? Or at least keep him out of my damn stuff?"

Spock is reasonably certain that no firewall could ever keep Jim Kirk out of McCoy's phone.

Jim is still snickering when their servers appears at their table. "How's everything tasting," she asks, and continues without waiting for the answers. "Do you need any cheese for your pasta?" This must be directed to Spock, since he is the only one who ordered pasta. He opens his mouth to answer, but he's beaten to it.

"Oh, _no_." Jim's face and voice are a combination of artful horror and sheer disgust. Fully knowing where this is heading, Spock stifles the fourteenth sigh of the night and McCoy rolls his eyes. " _He_ is a _vegan_."

Spock crosses his arms over his chest. "I am not a vegan." he says, already feeling drained by the conversation.

Jim drops the fry he was in the process of bringing to his mouth and turns further into the waitress, now looking uncomfortably between the three of them, and launches into an unrequested explanation. "He would publish in PLOS ONE before admitting to be a vegan, but he doesn't eat meat, eggs or dairies. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck—you know, this is probably the wrong parallel. What about, if it looks like fried tofu, swims like—"

"Excuse him, ma'am." The thing is. McCoy pretends to be annoyed, but in truth finds the scene quite entertaining, now that he's not the focus of Jim's attentions anymore. Spock can easily deduce it from the fact that he is smiling, if faintly, behind his beer. He makes a mental note to let him deactivate his Tinder account on his own, next time. "Jim. Cut it out. You're scaring our server. Again."

Jim leans forward over the table. "What's the last thing with meat or dairy you had." It is not intoned as question. As a challenge, rather. "Breast milk does not count."

"I will, um, you guys just holler if you need anything." The waitress departs, clearly with no intention of ever coming back.

Spock knows very well that it rests firmly on his shoulders, the fact that Jim behaves like this. He should have simply never engaged socially with him again after he dragged Spock to the seediest bar he had ever stepped foot in and forced him to be his partner in a darts tournament, which predictably ended in a fight. Inexplicably, it had been three hours and twenty-three minutes after they first met, when Jim was interviewing at UCSF for his current position. "I recently had a cookie," he supplies after he is done chewing a bite of his pasta.

"No shit. You had a _cookie_?" This is McCoy. Et tu, McCoy. "Tut-tut. How the mighty have fallen."

Jim looks flabbergasted. "He had a cookie and we didn't get to see him eat it? When did you even buy a cookie? Wait. Was it a vegan cookie?"

Spock opts to answer only the last question. "I do not believe so. I did not think to ask, as I am not a vegan."

"You know Spock, ain't nothing wrong in being a vegan." McCoy says it before popping a bite of his steak in his mouth and chewing with relish. Spock just looks at him pointedly, and his smile gets exponentially larger. "I'm happy to write you a prescription for supplements."

Jim leans forward. "Spock, you should have come to me. Friends don't let their vegan friends cheat on their diet with a cookie. They get them barbeque."

Spock sighs. Again. "There is no vegan diet. And the cookie was a gift."

"Oh, yeah, that seems like a good reason to give in after years of veganism. I gotta say, you're way more temptable than I thought." Jim has stuffed at least ten fries in his mouth, and still manages to speak intelligibly. It must be some sort of record. "Who from?"

"A student."

"Spock, first rule, even I know it and I'm pre-tenure: never accept food from your students, it's likely to be poiso—Hey!"

In the effort of preventing McCoy from stealing one of his fries, Jim, loses interest in the conversation and grabs his fork to defend his plate. Relieved, Spock turns to his pasta, hoping it will be the end of it. It is not until a later, when Jim stands to go to the restroom, that he notices that McCoy has been staring at him, his expression inquisitive.

...

"Well, well, well." His bottle is not close to being full, and Spock deems it safe to look up from the water fountain. "If it isn't the computer scientists. Coming to steal our water."

It is not Nyota who spoke, although she is right there in her green dress, one shoulder propped against the wall. It must have been the taller, redheaded girl, standing next to her with her arms crossed. Gaila, his brain provides. Nyota's roommate. If Spock were a wishful thinker, he would convince himself that the fact that he just recognized someone whom he has only heard about in passing conversation is a sign of marked improvement in his social cue processing skills. As he is not, this is just another reminder of the amount of time he and Nyota have been spending together, and of the fact that any information about her life that she chooses to disclose is automatically stored in the forefront of his mind.

He pulls away his water bottle before it overflows and screws the cap.

"Gaila. You're not even in Linguistics. And you came in here to get water, too," Nyota chides gently.

"Linguistics, Civil Engineering, same thing," she replies cheerfully.

"Tell that to our post-graduation employment rates," Nyota mumbles, barely audible.

Jim laughs loudly. "Good one. _Miss Uhura_. Hey, why is Linguistics the only building on this side of campus without that poisonous crap in the water?"

"Old, rusty pipes," Gaila smiles happily. "They were going to tear down this pile of bricks ages ago, so they never did any renovations, but then the plans for a new building never got approved. It has a different water supply from the surrounding buildings. Hey," she perks up even more, "did you know that until eight years ago Neuroscience used to be in here, but then the Institutional Animal Care committee found that the space was not safe for the research animals, and so instead of condemning it they put the Linguistics department in here? Isn't that hilarious?"

Nyota has obviously heard this story before, and judging from her eye roll she does not find it hilarious. Or funny. Or mildly amusing. Jim, on the other hand.

"No way!" He hands his still empty water bottle to Spock, who stupidly accepts it, and is inching closer to Gaila. "Hey, how do you know so much about this? Jim Kirk, by the way."

Spock rapidly calculates the probability that Jim will do something stupid in a crowded hallway in the middle of the day and decides to let him be. It is less than thirty percent, which are acceptable odds, all considered.

"It really _does_ sounds like the board'll give us the go ahead for a new building at the end of the year," Nyota tells him peevishly. She is standing closer to him now. Has essentially switched places with Jim, who is deep in conversation with Gaila.

"I hope they will," he says. "I do not like the idea of you in a condemned building." It is just an expression, of course. Likes, or dislikes, have little importance, for Spock.

Nonetheless, she smiles. "You heard Gaila. I'm fine as long as I'm not a lab rat." She is definitely not one. The furthest thing from. He knows, because he has worked with lab rats in he past. "Anyway. Nice to see you here, for a change. Though it must feel like slumming a bit."

"It does not." It does not. Not with her standing in the building, surrounded by decrepit pin boards and what looks remarkably like an entire row of missing tiles on the floor. "Informatics Engineering would, however."

Really. The sound of her laughter makes the building look positively futuristic. "What's up with _that_ rivalry, anyway?"

He feels the corner of his mouth lift up. "A rivalry would imply that two items are even remotely comparable."

"I see. Which is false in this case, because Engineering is so much better and more useful than Computer Science—"

His expression makes her chuckle so hard that she gives up on finishing the sentence.

"You're so easy to play."

Is he? "Am I?"

She just nods. And then stops nodding. And one of them should probably say something, because now they are just looking at each other, with mirroring faint smiles, and he knows, because he has learned it, that for some reason he will never fully understand silences between communication partners should not be stretched for over four seconds. They are currently at five point three.

Lucky for them that Jim is here, then. He supposes.

"Ready to go back to our new, shiny, spotless, bay-windowed, roach-less building, Spock?" Jim has stepped between them, and while he is addressing Spock he is looking pointedly at Nyota.

Who does not skip a beat. "Yes, you should go, Spock, and bring Doctor Kirk with you. We could do without the extra roach, in here."

"Boom!" Gaila's scream is so loud that a group of students several feet from them turns to examine the commotion.

Jim grabs Spock by the elbow and drags him out, snickering against his will, his water bottle still empty.

 _Fierce_. She is fierce.

...

He hears the sound of someone running on the path to Computer Science and assumes that it is an undergraduate student, sprinting to their destination during the last day of finals week. A last minute change in location, perhaps, or an alarm clock ignored for too long after some of the busiest days of the semester. Fitting, that the whole week has been uncharacteristically cold, and dreary.

"Spock!" He turns in time to see her come at a stop in front of him, her braid bouncing over her shoulder and scarf. She is a little breathless. "I got it. The fellowship."

Ah.

He knew, of course. A minor scandal in the department, that an external student's application scored higher than almost any of the others. A major one, that the student is originally from a field that is somewhere between the humanities and social sciences. Spock has received two visits from disgruntled advisors in the past twenty-four hours, has spent time that he does not have first staring at them until they finished airing their complaints, then pointedly listing the merits of Nyota's application when they would not leave without the promise that _his student_ would turn down the fellowship.

She does not need to know any of it.

"Congratulations."

She smiles, wide, still breathing a little heavy. It is not distracting. "Thanks. And thank you for the letter. And the feedback. And for telling me about the whole thing in the first place."

"You are welcome."

She has never not been welcome, as far as he can recall.

"I should, um, but you a drink. To thank you." She gestures vaguely to her right, presumably to the closest café on campus. It is eight forty eight AM, and Spock does not believe that she intends to purchase an alcoholic beverage for him. "Coffee?"

"You do not need to buy me a drink." Spock tells her, and is surprised to see her smile fade a little. So he adds, "I believe it was the easiest recommendation letter I have ever written."

Is she flushing? "Still, I, um—" She is now lightly massaging her nape under her scarf, studying her boots for a moment before looking up again. "Thanks. This will make next semester so much better for me. Although, worse for Vina, as it turns out."

He cocks his head. "Why is that?"

She shrugs. "She'll have to find a new TA for her Psycholinguistics class. It's okay, there are plenty of students who can teach it, it's just that she's used to having me."

Not hard to imagine. Very plausible, in fact, that someone could get used to her presence.

"Is Vina…" Distressed? Upset? Enraged? He finds that he wants to know, as both he and Nyota are likely to bear the brunt of her disappointment.

She shakes her head. "No. No, she's just… You know. How advisors are."

He has never been playful a day in his life, and therefore the way he raises his eyebrows could by no means be construed as playful. "Helpful and considerate?"

She closes her eyes while she laughs, tension visibly releasing from her shoulders. "Yes. Yes. All that. Generally marvelous." She studies him, a smile still on her lips. "Was you advisor always helpful and considerate and generally marvelous?"

Spock thinks about for a minute. "My Ph.D. advisor would ignore me for stretches of weeks, months sometimes, only to abruptly pull a chair next to my station and demand I show him all my progress to date in an impromptu data blitz." It has been a long time since Spock has felt intimidated by another person as he did back then, and yet he finds that with the tempering of years and his own academic successes the memory is not quite unpleasant. "It was somewhat disrupting. However, he was able to solve major problems and setbacks I would struggle on for days in a matter of seconds, and with little context." Spock cannot remember ever being in such awe of another person.

"Sounds about right."

He wonders if she is as intimidated by Vina as he was by Tom. "Would you like me to speak to Vina?" He does carry some influence with the Pikes, but he would not know what to say. That Nyota deserves all the time she can have to work on her research, as it is outstanding. That she is, herself, outstanding. That she is driven and motivated and remarkably intelligent. That there are often shadows under her eyes.

All of these things, perhaps. That Vina undoubtedly already knows.

"No. No, she'll be fine. I'll offer to help with the materials as much as possible, and she'll forgive me." She does not seem too worried, he thinks. Although he has been wrong before, with several people, in several circumstances. "But thanks for offering. I just wanted to, you know. Thank you. For all the help, and everything that you've done." A quick smile, and she has turned and left before he can answer with the customary platitude. Or with a sincere response, for that matter.

But she pauses a handful of steps away from him, while he is still tracking her form. She spins to face him, arms hugging herself. "I'm happy we met," she adds, and then she is gone, the day uncharacteristically cold, and dreary, again.

...

 **From:** Spock Grayson _Spock-Grayson_

 **To:** Nyota Uhura _Nyota-Uhura_

CC: Francis Schmidt _Fran-Schmidt_

 **Subject:** Office Space

Nyota,

One of my students has recently accepted a job offer and vacated his office in my lab. You may use it at your convenience, should you wish to. Mr. Schmidt (cc'd) will make sure the keys and exact location are made available to you as soon as possible.

Spock

...

 **McCoy:** So, got the prelim. for the stroke study.

 **McCoy:** 33 participants, 18 in the experimental group.

 **McCoy:** Data's all over the place.

 **McCoy:** No group differences. Cause the standard error's as big as a barn.

 **McCoy:** Might need you guys to fix it with your thingamajig.

 **McCoy:** That black magic you do.

 **Spock:** Are you referring to statistical modeling?

 **McCoy:** If that's what you kids call it nowadays.

 **McCoy:** When can you do it by?

 **Spock:** I have a deadline on Monday, so not for three days, at the very least.

 **Spock:** Jim, could you get to it sooner than that?

 **McCoy:** Jim? Did you fall asleep in the copy room again?

 **Jim:** Sorry, was in a meeting with Hendorff for like two hours.

 **Jim:** Why the fuck does he make so much eye contact? Is he trying to steal my soul?

 **Jim:** Upload the files on my server, Bones. I'll take care of it tonight.

 **Spock:** Thank you, Jim.

 **Jim:** The Mozart of modeling is always at your service, Ladies.

 **McCoy:** The Mozart of my freaking ass.

 **Jim:** I didn't think you'd be interested, but yes, of course, you only have to say the words.

 **McCoy:** Oh Christ.

 **McCoy:** Now I need to get my brain bleached.

 **Jim:** Your loss.

 **McCoy:** How!?

 _Spock has left this conversation, and will no longer see your messages._

...

Like every morning he has biked to work. Planning to ride home from work, like every night.

He should have known better. Would have, if he had bothered to check the weather forecasts.

The rain is torrential, and there is little he can do except staring at the rivulets running down the windows, his helmet dangling uselessly from his fingers.

"I drove this morning. Let me give you a ride."

It is _her_ , standing a few inches to his right, a yellow plastic key holder that reads 'I survived the Great Vowel Shift' visible in her hand. Spock wonders how long he has spent studying the water. "It's the least I can do, since thanks to you I now work in an office with a window _and_ heat." Her smile is… Yes. Of course. "I thought the two were mutually exclusive. Let me tell you, it's so much easier to type without gloves on."

How is it that she makes _him_ want to smile, though?

He car smells like jasmine, and it is small, and old, and one more thing he knows he will be thinking about, just a few days after dispelling the image of her stuck in a building without fire exits. As soon as she turns the ignition key, music blasts loudly, making them both flinch.

It is a combination of several high-pitched autotuned voices, strong, fast beats, and _something_ that sounds remarkably like a dentist's drill. Spock would not know how else to define the song. Pop, certainly. Very pop. Aggressively, pop.

Lightning quick, she turns the music off by punching a large, round button with the palm of her hand.

Blessed silence.

"Sorry, um, that was… You know. The radio. Nothing I would voluntarily listen to."

Her cheeks are flushing, if faintly. Spock is no better, as he is losing control of the corner of his lips. Yet again.

"Was it? I thought I read MP3 on the screen."

She throws him a surly look. "Yeah. Sure. Just another radio broadcasting methods. AM, FM. MP3. You know."

He does not laugh. He will not laugh. He might smile, though. "I hope you will find that my company is a safe space for your musical preferences." He is not teasing her. It would be highly inappropriate. "I have often been mocked for the music I enjoy listening to." By Jim, mostly. Proposing to play classical music when the drove down to Joshua Tree might have been another inexcusable mistake.

"Really?" She seems dubious. "What kind of music do you listen to?"

He shrugs. "Several kinds." He cannot recall the last time he shrug, or gave this evasive and imprecise an answer to a question.

She narrows her eyes, but cannot sustain the expression and breaks into a smile. A sly one. Not quite arresting, for once. "Is it One Direction?"

He turns away and pointedly looks in front of him, taking in the sparsely lit parking lot. "I am sure I do not know what you are referring to."

"Ok, wait, is it Marilyn Manson?"

He dips his chin. If he cannot avoid smiling, the least he can do is hide it. "Who?"

She inhales abruptly. "Oh god. Is it Nickelback? Spock, you might have to walk home after all."

"It is not," he answers, affronted.

She laughs. "Ok. I'll drive you, then. Where do you live?"

She is a very competent driver, if cautious because of the rain. It never ceases to amaze Spock, the sudden reduction in the amount of traffic around campus following finals week. It is quite obvious, that undergraduate students are as anxious to be rid of faculty and their demands as the opposite is true.

"Are you going back to Sweden for the break?"

Not if he can avoid it, and it appears that he does, this year. "No, I have no plans to." He pauses, and finds himself wanting to know where she will spend the following weeks. "What about you?"

"I'm flying to my parents' place in two days." He is, of course, unaffected by the fact that she will be out of town for a certain amount of time. It bears no impact on his life, as he will not hold office hours, anyway, and she is at a stage of her project that requires little input from him. "I'll be back after New Year's Eve." Remarkably imprecise. It could mean January 1st, at two minutes past midnight. Or ten days later. Or ten months later. Impossible, to narrow down, especially because the fellowship essentially frees her from most obligations on campus. And naturally he is glad that it so, as it will reduce her workload. "I miss my parents like crazy when I'm here, but they still treat me like I'm fourteen when I'm home. I mean, I have a _curfew_. I'm twenty-seven."

He had not known her age. Had never wondered, of course, as what interest would that specific piece of information hold for him. "Do they actively enforce it?"

"Oh, yeah. It's at midnight, so it's not as if they have to stay up that late." She does not appear to be angry. A little irritated, perhaps, but mostly fond. Of her parents, and their irrational protectiveness. "What about you?" she continues, jokingly. She switches the turn signal on. "Did you have a curfew during grad school? Or were you treated like a normal adult?"

He turns to look at the condensation forming on the car window. He could answer her question in several ways. He could explain that when he started his Ph.D. he was seventeen, and that it would not have been unreasonable for his parents to set boundaries for him. He could say that, however, his mother was never the type to manifest her worry for his safety by setting such boundaries. Or he could say that by the time he moved to Boston his father had long given up on influencing Spock's lifestyle, and cared nothing about his habits.

And yet. For once, he finds himself wanting to tell her about _himself_ , as opposed to the constellation of circumstances that his life has been. "It would have been pointless, as my concept of fun has rarely, if ever, included late nights out."

She laughs, and turns into his street. How can they already be here? "Maybe you just need someone to show you the joys of late nights out."

He shakes his head. "Jim has taken it upon himself to show me for the past four years." Four point nine, to be precise.

She winces slightly. "You mean Doctor Kirk? Yeah…No, a night out with him sounds like work." She looks aghast. Whatever she is imaging Jim has put Spock through, it is probably accurate. "But there fun things to be done at night, outside. Downtown San Francisco is beautiful, and so is the Bay. And there are some quiet spots I like to go to." She turns to look at him. "Maybe I should take you."

She should not. She is a student, his student for all intents and purposes, and he is faculty, and moreover a member of her dissertation committee. She should not, and he should not, and they should not.

"Maybe," he replies.

She smiles. Beautiful. It is a beautiful smile, that she has. "Is this the house?"

"That one."

It is raining harder than when they left campus, and he will get wet, there is no way around it. He will enter his apartment, change into dry workout clothes, go back outside and run for eight, ten miles, counting his footfalls until his head is clear and empty and the knots that always tighten his mind when he is in her presence have come undone.

He finds the rain unpleasant, he really does.

"Thanks you for the ride."

"You're welcome." A deep breath. "I really…" The car has come to a stop, but she doesn't take her hands away from the wheel. Tightens them, actually, until her knuckles are white. Another deep breath. "Have a great break, if I don't see you." She was looking at him, at the beginning of the sentence, but as its direction shifted, so did her gaze.

"Likewise." Somehow, it does not seem sufficient. "Perhaps your parents will decide to extend your curfew."

"Perhaps." She smiles at her knees. "Bye, Spock."

"Goodbye, Nyota."

That night, he runs fourteen point seven miles under the pouring rain.


	4. Chapter 4

"Remind me, how far away from Earth is the nearest star?"

Spock finishes zipping up his sleeping bag and adjusts until he has achieved a semblance of comfort. He is lying on his back, his view of the sky unobstructed. "Are you referring to the sun?"

"Oh, right. I knew that." They are close enough that Jim's thigh is brushing against his, but it is through several layers of fabric, and Spock does not mind. "How far from Earth?"

"Less than five times ten to the negative sixth parsecs."

"What does that even mean?"

"Approximately one hundred and fifty million kilometers, I believe."

"You're so fucking European, Spock."

"Actually, together with Myanmar and Liberia, the United States of America is the only—"

"Yes, yes, I know, the metric system is what keeps you warm during those cold, lonely nights." Jim's tone is jovial.

"I could convert it into yards, if it helped."

"Show off."

"Jim, you have been climbing rock formations all day, begging me to look at you while you did it."

"And it was a sight to behold, wasn't it?"

Spock shakes his head, feeling the unyielding ground under his inion, a smile playing on his lips.

"Damn. This is amazing."

"Agreed."

It is New Year's Eve, and they are in Yosemite. They fall asleep long before midnight.

...

He does not swim very often, for two separate reasons.

The first is that the University Aquatic Center is tiresomely crowded with undergraduate students, who are not very skilled at hiding their shock when seeing the professor who gave them the B minus they worked quite hard for half undressed. Spock has never been self-conscious, but he draws the line at being surreptitiously ogled while he is poolside toweling himself dry.

The second is the cold. Of the locker room as he changes into his swim trunks; of the shower water before entering the swimming area; of the fifty or so wet, drafty steps until the starting block; of the first few minutes in the water, before his thermoceptors adapt to the new environment.

But there is a moment. A sweet spot. If the pool is almost deserted. Right after he has swum uninterrupted for at least one hour, and his muscles are pleasantly exhausted, and his mind is unfilled of the usual clutter, hollowed out. When he has just exited the water and the chlorine-heavy air does not feel suffocating, but enveloping and warm. A moment in which he regrets that he does not make the time to swim more often.

He does not notice her because he is fatigued, he thinks. Or because he does not expect to see her in this specific location, and yes, he has thought of her several times today already, but every single one he imagined her to still be on the East Cost, with her family. Or perhaps the reason is just that he was busy lowering his goggles around his neck, and toweling his hair and face, so that when he resurfaces from the white cotton and sees her smiling face he is not sure what to say.

"Thank god it's actually you. I though so and came closer, but wasn't sure and…" She shrugs, and… her shoulders are bare. Of course. As this is a swimming pool. "Happy new year."

He does not know precisely how long, but it takes him indisputably too long to answer. "Likewise."

It requires time, to settle. That she is back. That she is standing in front of him. That they are currently in same state, in the same city, in the same square meter. He finds that he wants to know when exactly she flew back to San Francisco, how long she has been closer to him than he imagined, if she ate as much home-made food has she had sworn she would. Except that he cannot. It is too demanding, to articulate the words, precisely because she is standing in front of him, after so long, and…

It does not help.

The expanse of skin that he can see surely does not help his efforts, or his resolutions. It does not help the direction of his gaze, and most of all the one of his thoughts.

In Yosemite, over three days spent between Jim's antics and dramatic landscapes, he told himself that that _this_ would stop. That he would be perfect. And should that reveal to be impossible, that he would at least be better. That he owes it to her, to his position, to his role in her academic career. But like this, with no preparation—

"I pegged you as a runner." She is playing with the lock of hair at the end of her braid. "Because of the picture in your office. The one with you and Doctor Kirk. And other people, with the racing bib."

Unruly. Unsuitable. Unacceptable.

"I run most days, and swim only rarely."

She appears to notice that she is fidgeting, and drops her hands from hair so that there are resting on her sides. "You work out a lot, then." It must be an impression, that her eyes slide down his chest as she says it. He is projecting his failures upon her. He does not know if he exercises a lot, only that he exercises as much as it is necessary for his peace of mind, which is becoming increasingly more often. He nods, for simplicity.

"Oh. It's good, I guess. Health benefits and stuff." He thinks that perhaps she is nervous, too. Perhaps his presence requires some adjustment on her part, too.

Spock hesitates. The sweet spot is fading rapidly. He is feeling both clammy and cold. "I find that it helps… manage stress." An understatement, if he's ever uttered one. For the chaos inside his head, that needs quenching, and sorting, and repackaging at every twist and turn.

She nods her understanding. "Your skin… You have goose bumps. It's cold, um, I should let you go." She should. And he should let her go. "I'll see you around, okay?"

He will not turn. He will not turn to watch her walk away. He told himself he would put an end to this. She is here to swim, not to provide him with sensory stimulations.

Semiprimes. There is an infinite reserve of semiprimes, that can fill his mind and push out unwanted visitors. Such as four, and six, and nine. Fifty-eight. Ninety-three. One-hundred and eighty-seven.

All useless. Before the hallway that leads to the locker room he does turn, and she is looking back at him.

...

"How's your student?"

Spock and McCoy have found, over the years, that being in the same room while revising grants and manuscripts helps considerably, even if they are both working on separate laptops. This is due to the fact that their bodies of knowledge are extremely complementary, and being physically close gives them the opportunity to ask pertinent questions and get immediate replies, without having to resort to emails and type long, convoluted answers. It also helps streamline their frequent arguments.

The current question is hardly pertinent, and Spock is too absorbed by the editing of his biosketch to fit the funding agency's ridiculous guidelines to be bothered to lift his eyes from his computer. "I currently supervise seven graduate students, which one are you referring to?"

It is the prolonged silence that jerks his attention away from the word document. Spock raises his chin and notices McCoy looking pointedly at him. "You know which one."

"I do not."

McCoy just stares at him for a few moments, leaning back in his chair. He nods once.

"I say we just get rid of the section on alpha synuclein and reference Shen et al 2009 for a review. They can look shit up on Wikipedia if they want to know more. Any objections?"

Spock does not have any.

...

He is surprised when instead of her usual enthusiasm her reaction is to chew her lower lip. He tells himself not to stare at her mouth, and then to stop staring at her mouth, as it does not hold the key to understanding her discomfort.

"You do not have to. I imagine that there are several Linguistics conferences that might offer a suitable venue to present your work."

She nods. "There's bajillion of those."

He frowns, and slides a blank piece of paper and a pencil in her direction. "Could you write down that number?"

She laughs, not that he hoped she would, and shakes her head. "It's just… it would be a different crowd than I'm used to. If I present my research to a Linguistics conference, I can predict the types of questions that I will get and field them, or tailor my talk accordingly, but I can't imagine what computer scientists would want to know, and… I was there when you gave seminar last semester, and I'm not as calm as you are. Everyone was really insistent with their comments, and you countered all of their objections point-by-point, but… I'm just _me_."

Ah. He sees, now. "That is not the norm. Researchers at this institution and others are particularly…" he has to think of the correct word for a few moments, "…aggressive when I present my work, for a number of reasons that have little to with my scholarship in itself, and a lot with their perception of me as a scholar." Spock realized a few years after entering academia that several factors which he considers trivial, such as having been a MacArthur Fellow, being named one of the 30 under 30 for years in a row, and having published early on a high profile paper that disparaged several problematic practices in his field, have made him more exposed than is the norm, and unlikeable to many of his peers. What Jim often refers to as his 'too cool for you' demeanor has additionally contributed to it. However. "However, if the idea of giving a talk is overwhelming, which is understandable at this stage of your career, presenting a scientific poster is an acceptable alternative. If it is uncommon in your field, I could help you get started."

She appears intrigued. "How would that work?"

"I will send you an example." He spins his chair to face his monitor. Marlena presented her work at an international conference only last month, and her poster was very well organized. The core of her work not dissimilar to what Nyota is currently doing. The name of the file, if he recalls correctly—

He looks up from his monitor at the sound of someone knocking on the door jamb.

It is Christine.

"Christine." She is holding a bundle of papers in front of the chest. Her white-blond hair is loose, and she is wearing a flattering blue dress. Christine is a professor in the College of Nursing, which makes her presence on this side of campus unexpected.

"Hey. I was sitting on a thesis committee in the Biology building and thought I'd stop by, but I see you're busy." She smiles. It is a warm, pleasant, friendly smile. Christine is a warm, pleasant, and friendly person, all considerations he made before first deciding to spend time with her, however little, away from campus. "Are we still on for tonight?"

He nods. "Yes."

She smiles, warm and friendly, first at him, and then at Nyota. Though, of course, she cannot know that this is Nyota, and likely consider her just another student, sitting in the chair in front of Spock's desk. Which, comes to think of, is exactly what Nyota is.

"Great. See you later." Christine leaves, the hem of her dress swirling as she spins around.

He returns his attention to his monitor. Ah, yes. ICMM16_ . He swiftly emails the file to Nyota, together with the PowerPoint version should she need a template to make her own poster, and then opens the file.

When he turns, he is surprised to find her looking not at the monitor, but at himself. Inquisitively.

He cocks his head. "Yes?"

She smiles, but it is shallow, and asymmetrical, and does not reach her eyes. "Show me the poster?"

He does, and explains her the type of work that will go into producing one.

"You will still have to talk about your work, but only to two, three people at a time. And the conversation will be much more informal. Gary and Lin are likely to be at the conference, and they could stand with you, in case you were asked methodological questions that you might not feel comfortable answering on your own. It is something I have done for all of my students when they first presented a poster," he adds, hoping she will not think that he lacks confidence in her.

"This sounds great, actually." There is a forced quality to her enthusiasm, which he is likely to be imagining.

He nods. "Very well. My lab will be able to cover travel costs an lodgings." He does not know if it is standard to offer this this type of support to students who are not technically part of his lab, but truthfully, he cares very little. "And Nyota."

She looks up from gathering her backpack.

"Yes?"

 _I'm just me_. Preposterous. A laughable statement, if he has ever heard one.

"You are a remarkable student." A remarkable person. Remarkable, period, although it is not his place to tell her that.

"I," She is looking at her knees, again. "I'm glad you think so."

It is not what he thinks. It is a fact.

Backpack on one shoulder, she stands and makes to leave. She spins around halfway, almost faces the door, but then appears to change her mind and turns back to him.

"Is she..." Her voice holds some hesitation, but she is looking at him squarely. "Was that your girlfriend?"

It takes him longer that it should to realize that she is referring to Christine.

It is not an inappropriate question. Not per se. Not entirely. Although it might be in this context, as she is his student, and he is acting as her mentor, and theirs is purely a work relationship, regardless of the unruliness of his thought. It is, in all likelihood, an inappropriate question.

Through the years, he has learned several ways of answering inappropriate questions without really answering, and without coming across as impolite. He has used them, several times, and in several circumstances, with mostly positive outcomes.

He has also told himself that he would be better.

And yet.

"No."

She just looks at him, and he looks back at her, and notices that she does not smile before leaving.

...

 **Jim:** Dude

 **Jim:** Will you marry me

 **Spock:** I believe you might have sent this to me accidentally.

 **Spock:** Again.

 **Jim:** Nope

 **Jim:** You still have Swedish citizenship, right

 **Spock:** Correct.

 **Jim:** Let's get married, then. I'm awesome in bed

 **Jim:** I'll learn to cook tofu

 **Jim:** And convert to veganaise

 **Jim:** Or however the fuck you spell it

 **Jim:** For you

 **Spock:** Jim?

 **Jim:** Just watching the presidential inauguration

 **Spock:** Ah.

...

He is not looking for her, yet he finds her in Zeus' room.

When the department hired him, Spock used a sizable chunk of the start up money to purchase a high-performance computer for those situations in which the intuitional HPCC system could not be employed. Years and several upgrades later, the machine supports the computational needs of his entire lab and, most times, of Jim's. Hence the nickname Zeus, which was given by one of his early graduate students and stuck through her graduation, until the day Spock found himself thinking he would need to call maintenance soon to check on Zeus' vents.

It is rare to find anyone in the room, as most students opt to use Zeus by connecting remotely. And yet here they are, Marlena and Gary sitting in front of the monitor, talking animatedly to Nyota, standing few steps behind them. They do not notice Spock's arrival.

"...analyzes all the mass emails sent through the UCSF system and scrapes info about events like parties, and seminars, and shit like that, and then it tells you where the nearest free food opportunity is, what type of food, how likely it is that there will be some left by the time you get there if you take the least trafficked route, and, wait for it, based on your background and personality profile it computes a personalized cost-benefit analysis. It took _ages_ to code the stats."

"Like, if you have a sweet tooth and are biology major you're not gonna go all the way to English building and listen to a seminar on psychoanalytic approaches to Whitman to get a slice of pizza."

"But you might take a peak at the Neuroscience seminar down the hall and grab a cookie or two."

"Whadd'ya think, eh? Pretty awesome?"

Nyota is momentarily speechless. "I think you guys are geniuses. Undoubtedly. But," she adds, and even if he cannot see her face, from her cautious tone he can safely guess that there is be a wrinkle between her eyebrows, "how long did all of this take you?"

"Oh, we have done nothing else for the past four days. We slept in Gary's office last night, he has a cot and an air mattress. But it's totally worth it. Look, there's popcorn at a Sociology emeritus talk—"

Spock crosses his hands over his chest. "How is the NASA project progressing?"

All three students startle and turn towards entrance, but only Gary and Marlena look somewhere between guilty and panicky. He thinks he hears Marlena mutter something that sounds remarkably like _merde._

"Spock…um, how long have you been there?"

He leans a little against the doorjamb. "Enough to be concerned about meeting the deadline for the NASA grant." He thinks about it, and decided to leave _the one your salary is coming from_ unspoken.

"We'll have the preliminary data on your desk by tomorrow night," says Marlena, voice overlapping with Gary's, "On it, boss!"

They run past him, out of the room before Spock can ask them to please, go home and get some sleep tonight, but with enough time for Gary to double check the location of the free popcorn, and for Nyota to clap a comforting hand on Marlena's shoulder.

Incredible, really. That he keeps finding himself stupefied by the fact that once two people leave a room that holds four, only two remain.

Unacceptable.

And she is already looking at him _like that_. With _that_ smile. "Gee, Spock. It sure sounds like you're starving your grads."

He shakes his head and stifles a sigh. "I believe salaries for Computer Science students are among the highest on campus."

"And yet. The must rely on free popcorn for nourishment, and spend their working hours neglecting the NASA project and devising stratagems to obtain more." Teasing. She is teasing him. Additionally, Spock is reasonably certain that she has never heard of the NASA project before the ongoing conversation. "You know, I read somewhere that the humanities only get about one percent of the federal spending allocated to the sciences. The least you can do is make the popcorn software available to tax payers."

In front of him. She has walked towards him and she is standing in front of him, closer than before, but not proximal enough that the situation is in any way inappropriate. He is, he thinks, unaffected.

"That was before."

She tips her face. Her hair, loose on her shoulders, shifts in response. It is disorienting. His thoughts are fuddled, clumsily stumbling around his too crowded head. His skin is simmering.

"Before?"

Ah, yes. They are having a conversation. "Before the Trump administration. It will be reduced further, with cuts to NEA and NEH. To point zero seven, is the last estimate."

She nods, a bitter shadow in her eyes, and he immediately wishes it were not so. He wishes he had not spoken.

"If I gave you the lab credit card, could you help me purchase a supply of snacks and make it available for the graduate students?" He is relatively certain that an ocean lies between what _he_ considers an enjoyable snack and what his students would.

She smiles. It is arresting. "I thought you'd never ask."

...

He finds three printed pages in his mailbox.

It is section four point three of the UCSF Academic Code, which deals exclusively with faculty-student socialization regulations. Spock skims it, words like _power differential_ , _conflict of interest_ , and _breach of trust_ almost jumping at his eyes. _Non-consensual_ , too.

He texts McCoy.

 **Spock:** Next time, an email will suffice.

 **McCoy:** I thought if I sacrificed a tree it might get more attention from that IKEA brain of yours.

 **McCoy:** Thank Jocelyn's lawyer for my monthly alimony, or I might have sprung for a singing telegram.

 **Spock:** Were you unable to understand how to send a link to the relevant section?

 **McCoy:** Shut up.

...

Every single day he could, if he wanted to, walk past her office on his way out of the building.

It would not be a detour, as the time to reach the stairwell is the same whether he decides to walk through the hallway that hosts the graduate students' offices, or to turn in the other direction and go past the faculty area.

Through the years, he has made a point of casually passing by his students' workspaces a few times a week. It is surprisingly high, the number of questions about current projects that they will ask Spock if he happens to be available, but that they will not feel comfortable emailing him with. Illogically high.

However.

In his effort to be better.

For a little while.

He thinks it wise to break the habit.

And yet, it is for nothing. She is everywhere, even when she is not there.

She is in his head while he runs increasingly long distances, in the coffee shop where he buys his tea, and in his bed as he lies awake. She is standing in the entrance of the Computer Science building, head bent on her phone, hours after the sun has set and the department has emptied of even the most zealous students. Entirely too late for her to still be here.

He briefly considers going back to his office. More than briefly, really, until she lifts her eyes and notices him, and then the decision is taken from him.

She smiles, and he just walks to her, helpless to stay put.

A problem. This is a problem, and he does not use the word lightly.

"Hey. Haven't see you in a while." No. He had been doing better. Or perhaps he had not, not at all. "Working late?"

He nods. "A grant deadline. Due in four days."

She shakes her head. "Does it ever let up?"

Sometimes. But only very slightly. "No." Any other answer would be a lie.

She laughs at his honesty. "I'm starting to think academia might not be the right place for me."

"Why?"

"You all seem to be awfully stressed. Always chasing after new grants. Answering emails on weekends. Wandering university buildings at all hours." He knows that she is teasing him. It does not help.

"And yet, here you are, at ten forty-six PM on a Tuesday."

"True," she replies ruefully.

"Academia cannot be the wrong place for you, if it is so." He does not want her to think so.

She looks to her side, but does not appear to be taking in her surroundings. "Maybe not for now, no. But I was hoping to…"

He inclines his head. He does not know how many seconds it takes him to prompt her to continue. Several. He was counting, but the way she is biting on her lip distracted him. "What were you hoping for?"

"Just... Sometimes I think that I couldn't do this if I had… hobbies, or kids, or a husband, or you know," she makes a sweeping gesture with both hands, still holding her phone with one of them, "a life."

Spock had heard this expression many times, from his students and from colleagues, but always struggles to make sense of it. "You do have a life."

"Of course. But not like normal people."

"You do not consider yourself normal?"

"I do, I…" she hesitates, studying her boots for a few seconds. "It's just, it's been a tough week. My closest childhood friend just bought a house, and my sister just had a baby, and look, he's really, really cute, and already smiles we think, which means that he's a genius—" she shows him what she must have been studying on her phone before she noticed him, which is a picture of an admittedly attractive infant clutching someone's finger, "—and I'm really, truly happy for them. But here I am, still a student, spending hours and days and years on something that I cannot even begin to explain to my family and friends. And, it's just… Sometimes it feels like everyone else is progressing with their lives aside from me, and…" she waves her hand dismissively, a self-deprecating smile making it clear that she has no intention to complete the sentence.

Unacceptable. Not that she should have this feeling, but that he should not know how to neutralize it. That he was not there to prevent it.

"Nyota." He does not like how tightly she is clutching her phone. "I cannot speak with any authority on the topic of work life balance, but I would wish for you to be aware, at all times, that your work is important. Your accomplishments might not fit the metric your family or your friends employ to evaluate their own progress, but do not think for a moment that you are not successful. You are, in fact, remarkable." Extraordinary. Unparalleled. Distracting, as nothing, no one has been before.

Impossible to be better, when he is asked to stand in front of her, to stand in the midst of _this thing_ occurring inside him, and impossible to put it into words, and numbers, and formulas. Impossible when she is looking at him _that way_ , as if he just unlocked something for her. So close. Not inappropriately so. Not quite appropriately so.

His head is several inches higher than hers, and as always she has to crane her neck to look at him, and then it is not, courtesy of her rising on tip toes, he imagines.

And then.

Her lips are brushing his, pressing against his, and he is motionless.

Petrified.

Time must have thickened. He must have lost track of a few seconds. He does not think he has been breathing, and his heart has never beaten this slowly, or this loudly.

The next thing he is aware of is that he is much taller than her, again, and that her eyes are large, more than it is warranted by the structure of her features, or by the way she applies her makeup. There is panic in them, clearly visible.

"That was out of line," she says, still looking at him. The panic is in her voice, too.

Searching. She is looking for a response from him, any response.

"It was," he answers, before he can think better of it.

She covers her lips with her palm. "I'm sorry. I... I'm so sorry."

She is gone, the sound of her steps against the marble floor deafening, well before he can think of what to say.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N** : Ironically, given the theme of this story, three days ago a labmate had a (minor) family emergency and I got stuck running his behavioral assays in dark phase every other night, so if I told you I was gonna post all of this in two days, well, I was young and foolish and didn't know any better. But I should be able to post the final chapter on Wednesday night, I promise!

Also, because I have zero (0 (zero)) time management skills, I might have rambled at length about human!Spock's haircut on Tumblr instead of, you know, Dissertating or something, if you're interested go check that out. (I'd love to post the link but for some reason fanfiction doesn't let me).

Thanks to everyone who left comments and kudos, you're the bestest!

…

"You sure look like shit."

"The grant is three quarters of a page of too long, and the significance section needs thorough reworking."

"What happened? Did you lose again against sever-year-old Magnus Carlsen? Just delete that goddamn app. It was a shitty Christmas present, and I regret it."

"We will also need to update the budget and forward it to the Division of Sponsored Programs before tomorrow at noon to obtain approval. Including overhead costs, this time."

"Did the Trump administration just outlaw long divisions?"

"Would you like me to complete the submission process, or would you rather do it?"

McCoy leans forward. "Spock. Are you okay?"

Spock is silent for two, three seconds. "And the references are not uniformly in APA style. They will need to be formatted."

McCoy just stares at him, and then nods.

...

She does not come for office hours, that week. He does not expect her to, nor he looks for her in the hallways, or among the clusters of students moving around campus, pressing in and out of the Computer Science building. He catches sight of her once, walking in the hallway in front of him, long hair a curtain over her shoulders and arms, and starts reciting prime powers.

He does not think. For days, he runs every free moment he has, reciting prime powers, and he just does not think.

...

They do not notice him because they do not expect him to be there.

Which speaks of their discerning abilities, as the fact that the flooring of the faculty lounge room is currently being redone has been communicated via email from both Christopher and Francis, the department secretary, and the workers have been quite noisy and disruptive to everyone's productivity. That they would not consider the possibility of faculty members using the fridge and the water boiler in the student lounge, and amend their chatter accordingly, qualifies them.

Their words define them.

"…the worst batch to date. The papers are unreadable. They are functionally illiterate, believe me."

"Dude. I hear you."

"And four exams. Four. Like, three midterms. Seems like more data points than you need to figure out if you want to pass of fail a student."

"Yeah, I know man, it's eight hours worth of proctoring, _at night_ , plus twenty people showing up for office hours convinced that their grade must be a freaking scantron mistake."

A sound of plastic being torn, and then chewing. The boiler turns off. Spock lifts it and pours the hot water into his mug, still facing away from the two students who entered the room a few moments ago. Still reciting prime powers.

… _one twenty-five_ …

"Fuck this shit. If I have to TA again next semester I'm just gonna drop out."

"Yeah. Hey, when's the department fellowship due for next semester?"

… _one thirty-nine, one forty-nine, one fifty-one…_

"Not for a while, I think. May or something. No, June."

"I'm applying for that for sure."

 _…one sixty-three, one sixty-seven …_

"For all the good it'll do you. They're probably just gonna give it to someone in Sociology or something."

 _…one seventy-one…_

"No shit, dude. No matter how dumb, they're gonna give it to someone in freaking Rhetoric, as long as it's a woman or a minority."

One seventy-one is not a prime power, which would normally mean restarting from number one. Not an issue. He would probably already be up to eighty-nine or so by the time he has reached his office and sat down to drink his tea.

Except that he finds himself having little intention of heading back to his office.

"Man, that was a fucking scandal. Like, a random chick from Linguistics gets a stipend because the department hotshot is training her for… whatever, a spelling bee, probably. And we're leading three discussion sections every week, plus a full worklo—"

"Do you truly believe that?"

Both students turn, whiplash-quick, as soon as Spock's words are out. He is very pleased to see shock give into panic, and then outright fear. It takes them a moment to process that someone else, that _Spock_ , has been in the room all along. As soon as they realize the implications they look at each other, uselessly, and then at him again. _Scared shitless_ , Jim would say, and quite aptly.

A suitable reaction, Spock believes.

He realizes he has had dealings with one of them in the past, for a collaboration. He is the tallest of the two, and his name is Mike Johnson, if Spock recalls correctly, and Spock always does. His advisor is one of the two faculty members who stormed into Spock's office as soon as Nyota's award was announced.

"We—Doctor Grayson…" Mike's voice is tentative. Defensive.

"If your opinion of yourselves is truly so inflated that you believe the only reason another applicant would be chosen over you is that they are receiving preferential treatment, I strongly urge you to compare your publication record with Miss Uhura's. You can download her résumé from the Linguistics website, I believe. I am certain that a five-minute conversation with her would enlighten you on the superiority of her research abilities, but I would not recommend you attempt it, as I do not wish to subject her to your company." He walks towards the door, towards them, steaming mug in hand, hoping to project a calm he does not feel. He is quite removed from anything resembling control. It has been a difficult week, and this last drop has brought him dangerously close to overflowing. Mark and his friend are paralyzed.

His tone is harsh, unforgiving as he continues. "My piece of advice, as the _hotshot_ of the department, is to learn to better deal with rejection. Given the qualities you just displayed, I expect you will encounter it very often."

A disaster. A shameful, disastrous week, brimful of poor decisions and frustrating, tiresome events, and now he is angry, fuming, something he has not had to deal with in years, decades, something he might not be equipped to face at this point. Prime powers cannot hope to bring him to a semblance of calm. He should go home, and perhaps run, wipe this fury out, before it becomes any worse—

He does not expect to find her just outside of the lounge, her expression clearly revealing that she heard the better part, if not all, of what went on inside.

He stops in his tracks.

The last time they stood like this, eight days, eighteen hours and seventeen minutes before, she kissed him, and drenched his mind in something that all the numbers in the universe have not been able to squeeze out.

He should say something. His failure to be better notwithstanding, she is still his student, and it is of paramount importance that he ensures that her self-regard is not affected by the illogical words of two idiots who have obviously little grasp on reality. It is crucial that he says something to counter the expression in her eyes, or the way her fingers are disappearing into her fist.

And yet, he finds that he cannot guarantee what he would say, were he to open his mouth and speak. It could be any one of a dozen different thoughts that have been swirling around his head in past days, weeks, months, ready to break past a dam of numbers and physical exhaustion.

Diverting his gaze from hers, he steps around her and heads for his office.

He did not _know_ she would follow, although he is not surprised when he hears her footfalls. She is two, maybe three steps behind him, and he does not turn to look at her, not until his mug of tea is safely deposited on his desk, not until he has closed his eyes, taken several deep breaths, and then opened them again.

She has closed the door of his office, and is leaning back against it, palms flat against the surface.

With a fresh surge of anger, he notices the tension in her spine, the smudges under her eyes. Her gaze, however, is level.

"What they said—"

"I care nothing about what they said." He is not convinced that it is true. He also does not think that she believes it, but it is not his place to tell her what to feel.

"Very well, then." He takes one step further, which does little to shorten the distance between them. He has a very large, corner office. He _is_ the hotshot of the department. "Do you feel coerced?"

She huffs a silent laugh, and does not comment on the apparent one-eighty of the conversation. It is not a one-eighty at all, of course. "Do you, Spock?"

"You are not in a position of professional, academic and financial authority over me. You cannot withhold supervision and resources crucial to the success of my research projects should I decide to deny you something you wish. You cannot offer me preferential treatment in exchange of—" he will not use the word _sexual_ "—favors. You are not responsible for evaluating my performance, or for recommending me for academic position. Therefore no, I am not feeling coerced. Are you?"

She has held his gaze throughout his whole speech, unflinching. She must know. She must realize. And yet, she shakes her head and mumbles something under her breath, he tone too low to be aimed for him.

He finds himself irritated. He finds that he still wants to know what is it that she said.

"Excuse me?"

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

Spock feels like a broken record. "Pardon?"

"Chomsky."

Chomsky? "The linguist?"

"What you're saying, Spock. It's grammatically impeccable, and yet it makes no sense whatsoever to me." She is smiling now, and they are past teasing. She is mocking him. "Look at you. The embodied evidence that syntax and semantics are not one and the same."

"Why does it not make sense to you that your behavior might be construed as misplaced gratitude or an attempt to ingratiate—"

She pushes herself from the door and walks three steps towards him. His office is not so big that they are not close now. "Don't treat me as if I'm stupid, or defenseless, or opportunistic. I am not like that, and I know you don't think that of me. Whatever happened I initiated, and we both know that you went out of your way to provide me with _resources_ long before that, and that you did it without any expectation save my academic success." She _is_ fierce.

No wonder he ended up in this situation. No wonder he has failed at everything he has set out to accomplish. What a tragedy, for a scientist, to neglect to include in the most important element in his model.

He forbids himself from wiping at his face, and settles for briefly closing his eyes. "I must ask you one more time. Do you feel, or have you ever felt, coerced or pressured during your interactions with me? Any answer you might give will not make a difference in our professional relationship.'' If there has ever been such thing.

He never stood a chance.

Her shoulders relax, and she holds his gaze, smiling faintly. Ruefully, he thinks. "No."

He nods. "Very well, then," he repeats.

He has a disturbing amount of power over her. And what he wants to do to her… She should leave this office immediately. He should strongly suggest it to her.

Instead he says nothing while she dips her chin, studying her shoes, or his shoes, for a handful of seconds, and then lifts her face to his. The tone of her voice is even. "May I ask you on a date?"

Impossible. That she would make him want to smile, in the midst of all of this. Something liquefies, then coalesces into a different shape inside of his chest.

"I have not been on a date in many years. My performance in that area is likely to leave a lot to be desired."

The corners of her mouth lift higher. "I find that hard to believe. Although I am happy to provide supervision. And resources."

She is dangerous to him, as few people are. More dangerous than his father, in her own way. He should say no. He should take some time to think, for the first time in weeks, months, now that the lies and the omissions in which he has showered himself are nowhere to be found.

"Very well, then."

...

He finds that he wants.

He wants to make love to her, and he wants to fuck her, to hold her down and suck bruises on her collarbone.

He wants to teach her lambda calculus, fill her head with mathematical symbols and notions such as beta reduction and alpha conversion, and then, then he wants fill her mouth with his cock.

He wants to admire her while she slays adversaries and detractors, and he wants to harshly put down whoever dares to criticize her.

He wants to step back, and watch her succeed at everything she attempts out of her extraordinary strength, sheer perseverance, and stunning intelligence

He wants to lock her inside his closet to cherish and protect, to take out only when he needs her body and her mind to satiate his own.

He wants to ejaculate on her soft stomach, and inside of her, every place she will allow him.

He wants, and admitting it to himself is freeing, and admitting it to himself has him terrified.

...

His apartment is the only feasible option. She has a roommate, and everywhere else has the unfortunate characteristic of being _outside_ , and accessible to everyone who might know them, or that they should not be together outside of campus.

She looks beautiful at his doorstep, handing him beer of the brand she saw him drink at the Shipyard, smiling up at him, and it is several seconds before he remembers that he is allowed to think so, and to tell her as much. She just dips her chin and he simply does not know what to do, so he just turns and heads for the kitchen, knowing that she will follow.

"Do you cook?"

She is sitting on the counter next to the stove, while he is busy cutting tomato. He tries not to look at how her dress has ridden up one of her thighs, although she is perfectly decent. Conservative, compared to what he sees in his classroom nowadays.

"Rarely, and poorly. I should likely apologize in advance.

Her laugh is lovely, as usual. "It's ok. I'm here for the company. Are you sure you don't need help?"

He shakes his head. "I will take full responsibility of this."

"Spoken like a real cook." He never used to smile. "Or, you know…we could order out."

He lifts an eyebrow. "Do I detect mistrust in your tone?"

She tips her head. "Perhaps a touch of apprehension." She steals a wedge of fresh tomato. It is raw, unsalted. "Great job with the tomato, though."

"Thank you. It is my specialty. The secret is purchasing them."

She laughs, as he hoped she would.

"You remind of my roommate. She's one of the smartest people I know, but her go-to meal is spaghetti with ketchup. When she feels fancy, she adds canned tuna."

Spock frowns. "I am uncertain if I should feel horrified or grateful that the bar has been lowered for me."

"A mixture of both, probably." Spock starts cutting olives, pushing the cutting board closer to Nyota, angling it to give her better access should she want more tomato. "Initially I tried hiding her ketchup, but then she realized that she hadn't been misplacing it and she woke me up at three AM to yell at me to stop policing her food." Spock raises one eyebrow. "I know, I know, totally in her rights, my bad. But then I tried to think more strategically, and started cooking nice dishes for her. Like pasta with real sauce or, you know, couscous, or even very simple salads. Hoping that she would get into it." She nibbles on another slice of tomato, sucking on her index finger when she is finished. He deems it prudent to return his attention to the olives. "Turns out, _she_ actually thinks ketchup is better, and _I_ am terribly close-minded."

Spock feels the corner of his mouth tug up. Again. "I can think of worse things than preparing meals for your roommate."

"Such as?"

"My last roommate was Jim. He stayed with me for a month when he first moved to San Francisco, while he was looking for a suitable apartment." He rinses his hands, wipes them on the kitchen cloth. "After a few hours in the city he had a wider social circle than I did after living here for several years, and they often gathered in this apartment. My neighbors contacted the police with noise complaints. Twice." He does not think that he stepped closer to her, although he must have, because it is undeniable that their proximity has increased. "It was most disruptive."

"Doctor Kirk and Gaila would be perfect roommates."

"I am not certain that I would wish him upon Gaila."

How are they closer still? Are they leaning towards each other? They must be.

"She would love the social interaction. Although she would probably miss me, as I am currently in charge of her dirty laundry."

The last thing he sees is her smile, and the kiss that follows is completely different from their first. He does not know if he initiated it, but he is undoubtedly a most active participant, closing his lips around hers and then opening them, until their tongues meet, tentatively, and it is about twice as stupefying as anything he has ever felt.

This is a first date. No matter that they are in his apartment, even he knows that there is a certain expectation for events to unfold slowly. However, the hand that is not holding her nape is, to no conscious decision of his, sliding over her thigh, and the effort required to stop its ascent where the fabric of her dress begins is herculean. Her moan, and her arms around his neck, do not come to assistance.

He sucks on her lower lip, and she gasps, and this is enough. He draws the line at sliding her forward over the counter and rubbing her against his hard cock until he has made a mess of them both.

He attempts to shift back, but Nyota puts her hands around his nape and gently pulls him forward so that her lips are aligned to his hear. "Out of line, Doctor Grayson?" She bites his earlobe.

He buries his face in her neck and shakes his head, hands tightening on her waist. He could laugh at his own idiocy, or he could fuck her. Or he could do neither, with considerable effort.

Nyota Uhura. The perfect drug, addling his sanity.

"Dinner." He says in her skin. He is in control of his heartbeat, and of his respiratory rate.

So is she. "… Right." If her voice hitches, it is minimal. "I heard it's supposed to be awesome."

...

It is an exceedingly complicated situation, and yet she is exceedingly easy to talk to.

It is not different from the hours spent in his office, trying and often failing to remain on the topic of her dissertation. And yet it is completely different, the desk between evaporated, leaving very little, if anything, in its place.

"I can't believe I didn't know you're a grandmaster." She was delighted to notice his set, telling tales of playing against her parents and her siblings and mostly losing. "How did it not come up before?"

Spock swallows his bite. The pasta was not a success. She has managed to be graceful about it without uttering one single lie, charming him to no end. "It is hardly relevant to morphological patterns, or to dynamic algorithms."

She appears to think about it. "True. But then, neither is the fact that your hamster was named Heisenberg."

"It was my mother's hamster. I merely provided the name." He takes a sip of his beer. She has tried it, again, shrugged unimpressed, again, and decided to have water with her dinner. It is for the best, really, that she is here for the company. "And we have only known each other for a few months." Five months, seven days and eight hours.

"You know." She puts her fork down, and her smile is self-conscious. "There is no way you can remember this, but you were one of the judges when I presented my first-year project, ages ago. I had no idea who you were, but I remember thinking that you looked so intimidating." She shakes her head. Shy. Although he knows her not to be, sometimes she appears to be shy. He thinks that perhaps there are mountains inside her, and that he wishes to visit each one. "I made a joke during my talk and everyone on the panel laughed except for you, and… Now that I know you like this, yeah, it just doesn't seem like a big deal, but at the time I thought that for some reason you hated my work. And then there was that semester when they found toxic mold in the basement of Linguistics, and all the grads got assigned temporary offices on the tenth floor of Med Labs, and I'd see you in the elevator there all the time, and—"

"Fourteen."

Her brow wrinkles. "What?"

"We were together in the same elevator fourteen times." He could tell her more. He could explain that in the months elapsed between the moment he first saw her and the moment he first talked to her, he would sometimes catch sight of her walking on campus, or by the gym, or at the local coffee shop exactly half-way between Linguistics and Computer Science; he would look at her, always beautiful, often smiling, and then go about his work. He could tell her, he is about to, but what holds him back is the way she swallows, as if her throat were constricted, and the fact that she says nothing and just extends her hand until the tips of her fingers are touching his own.

Once the dishes are in the sink and he turns to ask her what she would like to do, he is glad that she takes his hand, not because he is nervous or timid, but because he needs to be reassured that this is her decision.

He has done this so many times that another man would surely use the word 'countless', and yet a sensation envelopes him, that he is unspinning a known factor, something commonplace, ordinary, and reformulating it with her.

Once her dress is off he has little command over his hands and his mouth. He licks the taste of her from the slopes of her skin, until her has committed to memory the topography of her shoulders.

Her breasts.

Her ribcage

Her hips.

Astonishing, that her beauty would surpass his expectations. The only thing able to pull his attention away from the slants of her body is the smile she offers as he plays her with his fingers. "Spock," she sighs inside his mouth, lips moving to trace his jaw. "I have been thinking about your hands."

 _Tell me all that you want_ , he wants to say. _Let provide it for you._

She is wet, but tight, and their gazes lock as he eases inside her slowly, carefully, until she has taken all of him that she can. And then he uses his palm on her thighs to coax her to spread further, accept more, until he has bottomed out and they are both gasping.

"Good?" he asks, feeling sweat dripping down his temple, and her cheekbones are flushed, her eyes clouded as she nods. He drops his forehead onto her collarbone, licks across a nipple almost absentmindedly, and is thankful for the condom dulling the feeling of her clenching around him.

When she shifts to adjust he feels the pleasure pulse in the base of his spine, and he murmurs things that are not coherent, begging her _please_ , to _be still_ , and to _not move_ , and then it is all for nothing. His control strains as they move against each other, and there is nothing civil, or respectful in the way he makes room for himself inside her, his heart a beating drum against hers.

"You," is the last thing she tells him, arms around his neck, before arching her back and exhaling, her body pulling rhythmically at his cock, and Spock comes like an avalanche, sucking his orgasm into the skin at the base of her throat.

...

Her cheek is tucked against his chest and shoulder, and her fingers are sliding over his ribs, his hipbone, his navel. He has told himself repeatedly that there are enough points of contact between them that he does not need an additional one, and yet his hand keeps returning to her body to trace patterns over her spine, the small of back, her backside.

"Would you like me to go hom—?"

"No."

He feels it through his muscles, her grin, the way she dips her chin. "Do you need a minute to think about it?"

Her hands on his body, soft and cool, are the most erotic thing he has ever experienced. Tomorrow they will need to leave this bed, and then the room, and then the apartment, and for minutes, hours at a time she will presumably not be in his line of sight, let alone close enough to touch. Spock is quite certain that it will be the very end of him.

"I do not. Unless you need to go home." He presses his nose into her hair. "Unless Tolkien needs you." Although, should that be the case, Spock will have to point out that needs her, too, and arrangements will have to be made. How can this be so new, and yet so familiar? And how has he never felt her giggle into his skin before? This is… "Mysig."

She lifts her head to look at him, chin propped onto her hand. "What?"

"Mysig." She wrinkles her brow, and he traces the vertical like between her eyebrows. "It is a Swedish word."

She smiles. "What does it mean?"

He thinks about it for a minute, his index finger sliding up and down the cleft between her buttocks. He is aroused, but does not want to fuck her again. Not yet. This is too _mysig_. "I do not believe there is a proper English translation." There are several close approximations, of course. He could list them, and try to explain. But why would he? He is certain that she is feeling the same way he is. She is radiating it.

"Right. Or you would have used the English word." She playfully bites his right pectoral muscle. Why must she make him want to smile so often? "Is it a good thing, at least?"

"It is terrible."

She bites again, with a little more strength, and he is as hard as a rock—but no. It took them so long to get here. He wants this to last.

"So, does this mean that you have no intention of helping me learn Swedish?"

As if she required his help. She is one of the smartest, most hard-working people he has ever had the privilege of meeting. "I am happy to help, but you do not need me to learn it." Spock is almost never happy, and he never, ever lies.

"But I do. Languages are hard."

He waves his left hand in her long hair, studying the way it fans over his chest. "I know they are." It is ink black. He snorts internally when he finds himself comparing it to silk. Besotted. He is besotted, and stereotypically so. And to think that he believed he could prevent this from happening. "Then again, even great apes are able to learn simple languages." He takes great care of devoiding his tone of any inflection. He wants to tease her until he has made her laugh, and then he wants to make love to her until she sinks in pleasure, and then he wants to sit back, and watch her conquer the world.

She narrows her eyes and props herself up on her elbow, but does not dislodge either of his hands. "First of all, monkeys are adorable and they are better and quicker than humans at several things, such as social and economic decision making and some arithmetic." Fierce. "Second, _Doctor Grayson_ , it is a common misconception that monkeys are able to learn languages. I expected better from you." He moves his thumb to her lower lip, and she impishly sucks on the meaty part of his most distal phalanx. With a hint of teeth.

"My apologies."

She shakes her head, trying to look serious with little success. "I'll have you know that as with many other things Chomsky was right about the fact that language acquisition is human-specific." This might very well be the first time in his life that Spock experiences jealousy, and it is towards the most prominent scholar in the field of Linguistics. Who is approaching ninety years of age. He should ponder over the unpredictability of life. "They were wrong."

"I wholeheartedly agree." A pause as he runs his thumb over her cheekbone. "They?"

She hides her face in the juncture between his shoulder and chest, but not before he can see that she has broken into a grin. When she lifts it again, she has regained her composure. "A team of psycholinguists, who wanted to prove that Noam Chomsky was wrong, and show that animals can acquire language too. So they took in a chimp and raised him like a human child, teaching him sign language and all that. They actually called him Nim Chimpsky."

Oh, the pettiness of academics. "Was he able to learn?"

She shakes her head. "Nope, not really. 'Cause languages are hard."

His hand tightens around the round swell of her buttock. "I see. Very well, then. I will help you learn Swedish."

She smiles and leans forward, her mouth brushing against his but not quite pressing against it. "What does _mysig_ mean?" Her breath is pleasantly warm on his skin. He is as hard as he has ever been.

"It means comfortable. Cozy."

She bites her lower lip, a twinkle in her eyes. "You don't seem confortable to me, though." Her hand slides down and wraps around his cock, the sensation knifing, traveling immediately up his spine, causing him to open his mouth and inhale abruptly.

It is a bonus. An unexpected coincidence, that her body should be as desirable to him as if she was created with him in mind, when it is her spirit that fascinates him so. A gift, that her breasts perfectly fill his hands, and that she would take him in her mouth until he is spent, and then accept him inside her again, and again, and again, until the end of her and the end of him meet.

The last thing in his mind before he falls asleep with her atop him, two fingers pressed inside her, is that he could not have been better than this


	6. Chapter 6

**Spock** : It is not likely that this meeting will finish at the time it was scheduled to.

 **Nyota** : You mean twenty-five minutes ago?

 **Spock** : Correct.

 **Nyota** : Good. I know faculty meetings are your favorites.

 **Spock** : …

 **Nyota** : JK. It's not a problem, we can just meet up tomorrow, or the day after.

 **Spock** : If it is acceptable, you could just let yourself into my apartment. I should be home no later than 9 PM.

 **Nyota** : Would you like me to?

 **Spock:** Yes.

 **Nyota** : Ok.

 **Nyota** : I'll make dinner.

 **Spock:** I am amenable to preparing it as soon as I return.

 **Nyota** : Nope!

 **Nyota** : No need!

 **Nyota** : I'm on it.

 **Spock** : …

 **Nyota** : Be safe biking home^_^

...

"Are you _smiling_?"

He minimizes the email he is reading while simultaneously looking up from his monitor. Christopher standing in the entrance of his office. "I am not."

Christopher lifts both eyebrows. "You are not now, but you were. A second ago."

"It is possible that you were mistaken. Perhaps your eyesight is deteriorating."

"My eyesight has deteriorated a long time ago, which is why I wear contacts. The corner of your mouth was totally curved upwards. Where I come from we call that a smile."

"I am not surprised, as you are from Kern County, California and your native language is Engl—"

"This better not have something to do with that Caltech interview."

It takes a minute for Spock to recall that he indeed interviewed at Caltech, in the previous semester. Several months ago. A lifetime ago. "I assure you that it does not."

Christopher's eyes narrow. "Then why were you smiling?"

"It is unclear what you are refer—"

"Spock."

He sighs. "There is a possibility that you witnessed an involuntary hemifacial spasm."

Christopher rolls his eyes and walks away. "If you say so."

Spock waits until he cannot hear his footsteps anymore. Then he reopens the email and starts typing the answer.

...

"This is beautiful," she tells him, alternating looking between him and the necklace.

 _She_ is beautiful. But he is gratified that she likes something he bought because it made him think of her, and for no other reason that he can discern. While gone on a five-day conference, during which time stretched and dilated until the impression was that weeks, months elapsed and he still was apart from her.

They are facing each other. As he fastens the necklace around her neck, she presses her hands on his shoulders and lifts on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek, and his fingers falter, suddenly clumsy.

...

"I would deem it safe to discard reviewer two's comment about the exclusionary criteria, as the editor and the other three reviewers did not raise similar issues."

McCoy is actively scowling. "Why the hell are you so chirpy?"

Spock pauses, the hand holding page three of the printout frozen in midair. "… Chirpy?"

"Yes, goddamn chirpy. What happened? Did they discover another subatomic particle?"

"Not as far as I am aware."

"Is it national broccoli day?"

Spock never rolls his eyes, and he does not in this occasion. "As I mentioned before, my fondness for broccoli has been vastly overestimated by both you and Jim—"

"It's that student, isn't?" He leans forward. McCoy's gaze is never not piercing, but now Spock has to actively fight not to divert his eyes. In the end, he still does. "Spock, you and I both know that deep down you're an idiot, but you need to be smart about this. People have been fired for shit like this. I spend half of my awake time worried about Jim's shenanigans, and the other half worried about this moron who wants to take healthcare away from twenty-five million people. Don't make me stay up late."

Spock can still feel Nyota's touch linger on the right side of his throat, where she laid her hand as they said goodbye in the morning.

McCoy did not ask him a question, and Spock does not answer.

...

"Wake up."

Her voice is soft in his ear, her weight negligible on his back. Negligible, that is, but welcome. Always welcome. His one complaint, should he be forced to file one, would be that her hair is tickling his nose, and that is the only reason why he shifts underneath her, pulling her down by his side while she giggles and effectively caging her in his arms. That, and the fact that he wants to sleep longer, with her, and only then wake up, with her. He yawns in the crown of her hair.

It has been decades since a person, and not a device or his internal clock, has awakened him, and it was never so enjoyable. He is entitled to some selfishness.

"Nooo." Her head in trapped under his chin, and her words are muffled against his chest. "I made breakfast to celebrate. You have to wake up."

"Celebrate?" He loosens the vise of his arms so that she can get—marginally—free, and opens his eyes.

He will get used to this, he continues telling himself. He will get used to her beauty, and to the pleasure of seeing her relaxed, without makeup and the defenses she puts on to face the outside world, and to the way she looks at him. He is not certain when, but it will happen, as it is the fate of all organisms, be the _Aplysia californica_ or _Homo sapiens sapiens_ , to decrease their responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations. He knows that it is bound to happen, as he himself has built several connectionist models that attest to the very principle of habituation. It must happen, else his heart will keep skipping beats.

"It's the first day of spring." She kisses him on the corner of his mouth.

"I see. We celebrate that?" It seems highly illogical, as spring arrives through neither his nor her merit. His sight is still a little blurry from sleep. He should press his fingers into his eyes, but that would mean letting her go, which in turn would mean…no.

"Yes. In this household we celebrate the arrival spring, and I have made breakfast," she declares, kissing the opposite corner.

"What did you make?" The only items he can recall seeing in his fridge are soy sauce, soy milk, spinach, and the complicated yogurts she usually eats for either breakfast or dessert. Which, she has informed him repeatedly, he should stop purchasing for her, as they are too expensive.

"Bacon."

He thinks their faces are too close to for her to see it, but even if they were not it would not matter, so he lets the corner of his lip curl upwards. "Is that so?"

"Yep. A whole piglet."

"I believe that in that case you would have cooked more than just bacon."

"Drat. You found me out." He has to kiss her. He must. "Okay, maybe I made pancakes." The words are spoken against his lips.

He makes his way down her throat, finding a spot he memorized weeks ago, together with many others. "I enjoy pancakes."

"I know." Her voice falters.

He shifts again, until she is underneath him and he is holding himself up on his elbows. Through his boxers, his erection is pressing against her soft stomach, left bare where her t-shirt (that reads, suspiciously, MIT – Computer Science) has ridden up. She gasps, and he does too, although he does a better job of hiding it. He thinks.

He licks her collarbone. "Can the pancakes wait?"

She nods, teeth biting into her lower lip, although it is only after a delay, and by then the t-shirt is completely off, and his mouth is between her thighs, her underwear pushed to the side.

It is difficult, to control himself with her, when it has never been before. Not impossible, but she is damp and sticky against his tongue, and his hand has to shift down and grasp the base of his cock, to avoid spilling before he is ready to. He thinks it must be difficult for her, too, because she tightens the fingers woven in his hair until her nails are grazing his scalp, and tells him that _she can't_ , and that _he needs to stop_ , and then they have shifted so that he is on his back again, and she is naked on top of him, trying to work him inside herself. With some struggle.

"Sometimes," she whispers, her forehead against his, his hands on her buttocks trying to resist the temptation of pushing her down on his cock, "if feels as if you should be too big for me." Her breath catches. "But then you never are."

It is not until minutes later, all delusions of controls destroyed by the friction of them moving together, that he realized that he feels the very same about her.

White pleasure tears through him.

...

When it happens, Jim is in Spock's office, feet over his desk, making light of a paper he was asked to review the day before. "Look at this histogram. There are no error bars. They forgot to add the fucking error bars. Like, the graph is literally just two black monoliths side by side. Who's the senior author, Stanley Kubrick?"

When Christopher arrives his face is set in stone and his back his stiff, but what alarms Spock the most is that he does not spare Jim a glance. "Spock, in my office. Immediately." He does not wait for him, the sound of his footsteps earsplitting in the sudden silence.

Jim looks at Spock for several seconds, and when he speaks there is not one ounce of prurient curiosity in his tone. "What the hell did you do?" Jim rarely sounds apprehensive, and Spock's heart rate increases.

Without conceit, Spock is aware that the amount of both prestige and private and federal grant funds he has brought to this department in the past decade has made him virtually untouchable in Christopher's eyes. He also does not believe that he has taken unfair advantage of the situation. Which is why he has little doubt as to the reason for this meeting.

"Tell me that it's not true. Just tell me that it's not true, and that the smartest person I know is not a closet moron."

Neither of them has sat down once the door was shut. "It is unclear to me what you are referring to."

"Vina's student. Nyota. Are you having—" Christopher stops himself. "Are you in a relationship with her?"

Spock is surprised to find that he does not feel the need to avert his gaze, or to withhold a verbal response. Still, his stomach plummets. "I am."

Christopher shuts his eyes, and then wipes at his face. The following pause is long enough that Spock wonders if the meeting will simply end, now that Christopher has Spock's admission.

"How long as this been going on?" His jaw is clenched, and Spock has the distinct impression that he has to force himself to push these specific words out, and not others.

"Does it matter?"

Christopher laughs, bitterly. "Oh, I don't know. Was it before you recommended her for a fellowship of thousands of dollars? Was it before you gave her an office in your lab space? Was it before you fucking sat on her prospectus meeting and fucking made the decision to approve her for candidacy?" The tone of his voice has been steadily increasing, and the last word is little less than a shout.

"The answer is no, to each of these questions."

"And why should I believe you?"

"Because I do not lie, as you are well aware."

"Oh, you lie by omission. Plenty. If three days ago someone had told me that one of my faculty was doing his own student, and that that faculty was you, I'd have answered that it was as likely as peace in the Middle East." He runs a hand through his hair.

Spock clenched both fists. Breathes deeply. "Your characterization of our relationship is highly inaccurate."

"What the fuck are you doing, Spock?" Christopher continues without showing any sign of having heard Spock's words. "Did you just body swap with Jim? Because they're doing great stuff in neurosurgery, they might be able to reverse it."

Spock clenches his jaw, too, and thinks it wise not to answer.

Christopher looks at him, searchingly, for a minute. Then he nods. "As the chair, I am in charge of dealing with the situation and establish disciplinary measures. First, there will have to be a meeting between Miss Uhura and Doctor Samuelson, the Linguistics chair, to ensure that the relationship was consensual. It will happen shortly, as I understand." Here it is. The worst part of all of this. That she is going through it. "If that is the case, and Spock, if it is not I will kill you with my bare hands, my recommendation will be that since I have no evidence that she has received preferential treatment from you, and I am lying my ass off right now so you better be grateful, no sanctions are imposed. At the academic level, you will need to severe every tie with her. She can't be based in your lab space, can't be seen in your office, and _I_ 've seen her there plenty, and for sure you cannot be in her dissertation committee—"

Something inside him turns to ice. "I am perfectly capable of separating my professional interest in her work and my—"

"Spock." Christopher raises his hand to interrupt him. "Don't even finish that sentence. It would lower the IQ of the entire floor."

"I am involved in her current research projects. She needs my supervision—"

"You should have though this through better, then." Christopher's words are hard. "Do you appreciate that if you were _anyone_ else I'd be launching an inquiry now? Do you realize the position you have put me, and above all Vina, in? And for fuck's sake, do you understand that Nyota's going to be that girl who fucked her way through her Ph.D. to everyone?"

She will, of course, and therein lies the reason they never even discussed making their relationship known. There is something angry, bloodthirsty, in his chest at this moment. "She has not."

" _I_ know it, and _you_ know it, but that's about it." Christopher shakes his head tiredly, and leans back on his desk. "Son, I know you, and I'd bet my kids' college funds that you're gonna end up marrying this girl. But you have handled the situation in the worst possible way, and she's the one in the vulnerable position. This meeting is over."

They stare at each other for several seconds.

 _I am sorry_ , Spock thinks of saying, but it would feel broad, encompassing, inclusive not only of his poor decisions and irresponsible behaviors, but also of Nyota herself. Of Nyota, and her acute observations. Of the way she never asks him to find words he does not own. Of how she stands on her tip toes to reach for the pan that he keeps on a shelf that is too high for her, and of the way she makes love to him, sweetly, unquestioning, after the havoc wreaked by a twenty minute conversation with his father in a language she does not understand.

He says nothing, and turns to leave.

"Spock."

Christopher's voice has him stop in front of the door.

"Did it have to be my wife's student? She's gonna murder me in my sleep."

He steps outside without deigning Christopher with an answer.

...

He tries to get in touch with her, and when she does not answer her phone, or her email, he knows immediately where she is, and has to force himself not to head to Linguistics and find Doctor Samuelson's office.

Work is unthinkable, and although it has been spring for over a month, it is hailing outside, a perfect mirror of his mood. Blindly, he snatches his gym bag, ignoring colleagues and students he passes in the hallway.

He sets the treadmill to nine miles per hour, and then he runs. And he runs. And he runs. He does not know for how long, unprecedented, and does not feel the usual burn in his calves and thighs, even after the natural light gives way to the artificial illumination of the gym. He only stops when Jim appears at his right, arms crossed over his chest, with a look that suggests that he will forcibly press the halt button if Spock does not descend immediately.

"I can't believe you managed it to hide it from me."

Spock wipes his face with a fresh towel Jim is holding out to him. "Who told Christopher?" he asks into white cotton.

Jim shrugs. "Hard to say. Scuttlebutt is that someone saw the two of you passionately make out on campus, but I also heard that you dropped on your knees and asked her to marry you after she got done giving seminar. Yeah, I didn't think so. After asking around, my guess is what probably happened is that Mark or Ed or Suzanne or some combination of these three formally went to Chris with very strong suspicions that something non-consensual might be going on, and since there've been low-key rumors about the two of your for months, which I foolishly never believed, I might add, Chris had to do something. Except for the non-consensual part, of course, which was probably made up to look less like tattletales and more like concerned citizens." Jim holds out a bottle of water, and Spock takes it with a nod, uncorking the cap. "Then someone proceeded to spread the news around the department. Took'em a couple of hours. You know, something to talk about and all that. You've been famous for years, now prepare to be infamous for a few more."

Jim just looks at Spock patiently as he guzzles down three quarters of the bottle.

"So did Chris tear you a new one?"

Spock wipes his mouth with his forearm. "It is not an incorrect description of what occurred."

Jim chuckles. "And wait until Vina gets her claws on you."

Spock looks at Jim. "Will you be able to take my position in her thesis committee?" No need to specify to whom he is referring.

A grin spreads slowly on Jim's face. "It will be my pleasure."

"Jim—"

"No, really, I'll be good. I like your little monster of a girlfriend. And I know _Miss Uhura_ likes me, deep down."

Spock sighs. There is very little he can do to avoid this, at the present juncture. "I will continue supervising her informally, of course. And I will help you with the paperwork."

"I wouldn't expect anything less. You love paperwork."

"I merely recognize its necessity."

"I've seen you write grant reports _for fun_." Out of gratitude, Spock refrains from pointing out that he wrote them only because Jim would not. "You know what, I really wanna be mad at you for not telling me, but I'm just happy that you're getting laid, that's how good friend I am. And there is also a tiny bit of schadenfreude, mainly 'cause I'm pretty sure that there's a betting pool somewhere in the department with me at the center of this clusterfuck, and you just cost someone a whole lot of money."

Spock sighs and turns to retrieves his gym bag and his phone. His feels a sense of heaviness in his chest as he notices that Nyota has not answered any of his messages. He is not able hide his expression quickly enough.

"Hey." Jim clasps his hand of Spock's shoulder, looking at him squarely. "It's shitty, I know. But it'll be fine. Neither of you did anything wrong."

Spock is not sure that it is a correct assessment of the situation, and fine has variable definitions, but he can appreciate the sentiment. "Thank you, Jim."

Jim laughs and gives him a forceful pat on the back. "That's what best friends are for, Doctor Grayson."

...

He is simultaneously relieved to find her waiting for him in his apartment, and dismayed to notice the redness of her eyes.

She just looks at him, sitting at his table, her tablet, a notebook, and a pen neatly arranged but ignored in front of her, and he finds that he cannot move, afraid to make another poor decision, to say something that will cause her to hurt even more. When she stands, and walks to him, and closes her arms around his torso, it is all he can do not pick her up and carry her to his bed, and keep her there for the rest of their lives.

"Looking at the positive side, now we can go out for dinner." She says the words into his shirt, crying and laughing at the same time, and he did not think it possible, but he has never loved anything or anyone more.

Why must she make him want to smile? In this situation?

"I am sorry. It is my fault." His hand is moving soothingly up and down her back.

"No. No, it's not. I told them the truth. That I basically assaulted you."

"Nyota. You did not." He presses kisses into the crown of her head, waving his fingers in her hair. "I should have informed Christopher as soon we…"

There was simply no reason to not go through the proper channels after the first night, or even before then, when he had been waging a losing battle. No reason, that is, except that she was the one who stood to lose something, and that relinquishing his role in that very part of her life that had finally brought her in his had seemed impossible. She lifts her forehead from his sternum, and he takes her face in his palm. "I was selfish." And a fool. "Forgive me."

She shakes her head. "What now?"

"Jim will take over from me on your thesis committee. I will of course continue to mentor you outside of—"

"No, I… I don't care about the committee, or my study, or—well, I do care about my study, but…" She has stepped back, and why is his apartment so cold? "I thought maybe… I mean, we haven't even discussed this, and I know technically we're not even really together but…"

 _Technically._

 _Together._

She swallows audibly, and there she is, studying her bare feet again, when she has not done so in weeks. Months.

"Nyota?" His tone sounds over-cautious to his own ears.

"Do you want to break up?"

He can parse the words. He is able to name the subject and the verb of the sentence almost immediately. However, it takes several seconds, between six and seven to be precise, to register her meaning. _Colorless green ideas sleep furiously_ , indeed. And when Spock finally gets there he can only reprimand himself for his sluggishness, because he can see clearly in the way she fidgets with the hem of her shirt that all it has done is convincing her that the answer to her question will be affirmative.

He opens his mouth, then closes it. Opens it again. "Why?"

"This," she waves a hand to include, him, and her, and the apartment where she has helped him make a life he did not think himself capable of in the span of a few short months, "it can't be good for you, and—"

" _This_ is—" Good. By far, the _best_ for him. "Nyota, you _must_ know…" He cannot finish, and she is crying in silent streaks, lips pressed together, and he _must_ be the reason why and therefore should give her physical, mental space away from himself and his mistakes, and yet. She is in his arms before he can stop himself, and does not seem to mind, so why should he? "We are. Together. And unless you do not want us to be anymore, we will remain so."

Her lips taste like salt, and herself, and he does not think he made the conscious decision to do it, and yet moments later he has picked her up, one arm under her knees, and sat them on couch, her weight on his lap grounding him, anchoring him. And if his mouth will not open to let out all that he feels for her, at least he can hold her and hope that she will know.

"Things are gonna suck on campus, aren't they?" It is minutes later, and she is speaking in the crook of his neck, the sensation of her eyelashes pleasantly ticklish every time she blinks.

"I believe so, yes."

"Gary didn't say hi to me when we meet right outside his office." Her tone is factual, not petulant or dejected, but she must feel Spock stiffen as he hears her words. "No, please. It's not his fault. You're their advisor, too" He closes his eyes. There is nothing that he can tell her about the fallout of this that she does not already know. He has never lied to her, and he is loath to start now.

Except.

He pulls back, lifting his hand to her cheek, ensuring that he can see her eyes as she says the words.

"We will be alright."

Her eyes are still red, and swollen, but suddenly she is smiling, and it is arresting. "I know."


	7. Epilogue

The bar is crowded, and noisy, and entirely darker than necessary to create 'ambiance', whatever that might signify, and if there are emergency exits Spock has not been able to locate them. However, considering that the establishment was Jim's selection, and that the median age of patrons appears to be at least as high as twenty-one, Spock will consider this outing a success.

"Hey, _Miss Uhura_ , shouldn't you get the next round? To ingratiate yourself with me and stuff? Since you're defending in two weeks, and all that."

Nyota smiles into her drink. It is of a color somewhere between orange and pink, and while she insists that it is supposed to taste like peach, after taking the smallest possible sip Spock struggles to believe that it contains something other than sugar. "Isn't that what got me stuck with you on my committee to begin with? That I did _things_ to get preferential treatments from my professors?"

Jim waves a hand dismissively. "Nah. That's what everyone _says_. But we all know the truth." He takes a pause for effect, and Spock, as is usual with Jim, is equally curious and apprehensive to see where he will land. "Which is that you're sleeping with Spock because his family is loaded."

McCoy covers his eyes, but not his smile, with his hand. Nyota just turns to face Spock, a task made harder by the fact that they are sitting very close, and that his arm is stretched against the back of her chair.

"Is your family loaded?"

He nods. "Fairly."

"Nice. How did that not come up before?" she asks with genuine curiosity.

"I did inform you that my father was a former Ambassador, and currently a politician."

"True," she concedes, and then turns to Jim. "I'm not going to buy a drink, since that could be construed as a bribery. Spock should though, since he's apparently rich. Also, I will promise you this: in two weeks you won't have to call me Miss Uhura anymore."

"Aaaw." Jim is clutching at his heart with his drink-free hand. "I'm moved. Finally you recognize the deep friendship than binds us."

Nyota nods, and inclines her head. "Doctor Uhura will suffice."

Impossible not to smile. For Spock, and for Jim, especially when McCoy high-fives Nyota, telling her that "That's the way!" and then turns to Spock to let him know that he might be in love with his girlfriend. Spock and Nyota's exchange a quick glance, and Spock is delighted to see the mischief in her eyes.

Jim is grinning. "You know what, I'm not gonna miss the two of you at all. Not even a little bit. Actually, I'm very glad that those terrible people on the East Coast offered you a post-doc position, Nyota. Ecstatic."

"We will be back often," Spock reassures him with a knowing look. Sabbatical or not, he still has several students who are scheduled to graduate in the next year or so.

"You better be. My computer ain't gonna fix itself."

Jim scowls. "Hey. I'm staying. I'm a computer genius, too. No need to revert to typewriters because Spock's leaving town."

McCoy ignores him. "So, what after that?" Given the number of their collaborations, McCoy is the one who stands to lose the most, should Spock and Nyota decide not to come back to UCSF at the end of the following academic year. And yet he has been the most supportive of their decision, since the very beginning. Or at least, after one or two weeks worth of _I told you so_ s.

"Depends on if, and where, I can get a faculty gig. Spock will either try to get another academic position at the institution I end up, or something in the industry. If nothing comes up, we might just move back to San Francisco, and I'll just teach high school. Or stay home with the cats." It is highly unlikely that this will be the outcome, but Spock enjoys seeing her playful smile whenever she talks about her 'plan B'.

Jim shakes his head slowly. "Doctor Spock Grayson. Spousal hire." His tone is incredulous.

Spock takes a sip of his beer, trying to conceal his amusement.

McCoy snorts. "They'd have to get married, first."

Spock knows that they are not being very subtle. But then, they are not trying to be. He looks at Nyota, and she looks right back at him with a conspiratorial air. She bites the side of her cheek in a failed attempt to prevent a smile and presses her leg more tightly against his.

Jim's jaw goes slack.

McCoy sputters. "Holy shit. What'd you two do?"

Nyota muffles her laugh in Spock's shoulder, and he takes her hand as he turns to his friends to explain exactly what they did.


End file.
